


The New Girl (A Novel by Nick Miller)

by Swell



Category: New Girl
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, Deleted Scenes, F/M, Pre-Canon, but not really, canon typical poor grammar, original scenes, sleeping nick mostly thinks about sex, written by Nick Miller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-10-14 17:33:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10541235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swell/pseuds/Swell
Summary: From the author of the best-selling surprise hit "The Pepperwood Chronicles" comes "The New Girl", a dramatic comedy about a girl, a guy, and some stuff that happens between them. And their weird group of friends.





	1. The New Girl is Kryptonite At the Wedding.

**Author's Note:**

> This work is inspired by other fics that retell a story from a different character's perspective. I wondered what a novelization of the events of the seasons would look like through Nick's eyes, so I started on this. There are some extra scenes which might cause little hiccups in continuity if you're the type who is obsessed with that sort of thing. The tenses and grammar are a little...odd at times and switch around because a) I have issues with it too b) so it's a style choice, to mimic Nick's.
> 
> Later chapters will be shorter (one-two episodes each) to make updates more frequent and make it easier to read!  
> Hope to update semi-regularly, depending on my Real World Problems™ schedule.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editing to be canon compliant post-"Five Stars for Beezus"; be warned for spoilers.

 

 **Prologue.** **  
  
**

Nick Miller was the kind of guy that didn’t believe in one true love. He was kinda scruffy, the approachable kind of attractive. His hair always did the sticky-uppy thing like he’d just woken up, unless he tamed it with a comb, which he usually didn’t bother to do, because if you start doing that, then people expect you to also do things like wash your sheets rather than just throwing them out every six months when you buy new ones. Wow, he also usually didn’t write run-on sentences either, but hey.  
  
That was the main thing that Nick Miller was- a writer. A writer of novels. Like a modern Hemingway. Well, mostly because of the underachieving and the drinking problem, but still, doesn’t that sound like a nice thing to write in quotes on the back of a dust jacket? “Nicholas Miller is a modern Hemingway.” And sure, he also had dropped out of law school three semesters before graduation, and was now a bartender, but at least that was an honest, salt of the Earth kind of job. Being a bartender was a thoroughly rustbelt occupation, a good Chicago job, which was important in a crap town like L.A.

 

The girls in L.A. were mostly as fake as their boobs. Sure, there were some really nice boobs that happened to be fake in L.A., but when you jiggled them the wrong way, they just revealed their fakeness like the girls did.

 

Nick had a couple of best friends who had been by his side for years. Winston, his childhood best friend from Chicago, was in Latvia playing professional basketball when this story starts. So we will get to him later. His other best friend, Schmidt, well- he was there, so let’s talk about him.

Schmidt was fat when Nick met him in college. Then he worked really hard, and got in shape, and didn’t drop out of school, so now he has a really high paying job, and looks like your typical L.A. metrosexual asshole, except that’s just his exterior, and maybe the first few layers under that. But the center of Schmidt will always be a gooey, sugary filling, like the awesome donuts that Nick and Schmidt shared so many times in college. So that’s the reason they are still best friends, and because all rental properties in California are about eleven bazillion dollars, they are also roommates.

 

There’s also Coach, who is from New York and the intimidating kind of attractive, but Nick is still glad he’s his friend and his roommate because Coach is the kind of guy you want on your side in a bar fight.

 

When they first moved to Los Angeles, Schmidt had managed to deceive their way into a totally kick ass loft in a decent building on a pretty shitty side of town, the kind of neighborhood where you talk about how much money you save by not having a nice car that will inevitably end up carjacked. And you don’t go outside at night and make the pizza guy come in and look out the window to ensure his own safety before he goes back down to the car he hopes is still at the curb.

 

The place had a grungy, industrial kind of feel, and Nick was pretty sure it had once been a meat packing facility, and possibly a slaughterhouse, or at least the place where they printed the labels for the meat. Because one time he drank 99 proof Latvian corn vodka and saw the ghosts of cows and pigs all around his bed. But yeah, probably.

 

The really nice thing about the place was that it had plenty of rooms. Including one that was probably meant to be a place to hang up the carcasses, but totally worked as a fourth bedroom when Nick used Contact Paper to cover a probably deactivated breaker box in the one corner, and added a bedroom looking door he found on a corner on trash day. Plus, it was right across from the kitchen, so it was probably supposed to be a bedroom anyway, and not a default out-of-season peacoat closet for Schmidt.

 

Nick liked Craigslist, and looking at Lost Connections ads, hoping to see one from the ex-girlfriend he was totally over, Caroline. Not that he would reply, mind you. Just to see that she was in a worse place than him. He clicked on the wrong section one night, and ended up in the rooms for share section, then burst in on Schmidt rearranging his ties by seasonal palette. Schmidt had snuck a few of the peacoats and now a table full of ties into the new bedroom, almost as though he thought Nick wouldn’t notice, but he totally did.

“Schmitty!” Nick shoved his laptop in his friend’s face. He was careful to hold it by the bottom and not let the duct-taped battery fall out. “Look at how much more beer money we could have.”  
  
“I didn’t think prices had gone up that high in this zip code!’ Schmidt didn’t even yell at the sudden intrusion. He practically had dollar signs on his pupils. “Thank you, moderately-priced housing crisis! Let’s rent out this closet!”

By that night, there was an ad that said things like “sun-soaked” and “beigey”. Nick and Schmidt sat back and waited for joint, specially-created Gmail account to fill with eager subletters.

They waited five days.

Finally, a message arrived in the box. Nick opened it eagerly. He forwarded it to Schmidt:  
  
“Dear homeowner,

I have found your property most beautiful and wish to move in immediately. I am travelling into San Diego from Nigeria. I am fleeing a family matter and wish to transfer my funding to a safe account to prevent its immediate seizure. I will pay you the entire year’s rent up front and redo your roof and landscaping in exchange for your generous cooperation, my friend. Please respond immediately. I fear for my life.  
  
Sincerely,

Prince Haram, ESQ”  
  
“Honestly, Nicholas. This is the oldest scam on the internet.”  
“But the free roof could really come in handy. We have a leak in quadrant five.”  
  
\--  
  
Three weeks later, Nick was trying to redeem a free Chinese food coupon, but the website kept saying he’d already used that email address, so he typed in the room rental address and then checked the account to score his free Fried Happy Family, Tues-Thurs, 3-4:15p, dine out only. The coupon was there, and four emails from the same email address.  
  
From: JDay1982@gmail.com [  
  
](mailto:JDay1982@gmail.com) Re: Your Rental  
  
Hello! I saw your ad on Craigslist! I think your place is so pretty! Is there a chance I could come and see it?

Thanks! :-)  
Jess

From: JDay1982@gmail.com

 

Re: The Room Rental  
  
Hi there,  
  
I think maybe you deleted my email by mistake? That’s okay! I am so interested in that space. Do you guys like dogs? I don’t have one, but I am open to living with one that doesn’t shed much. I’m so low maintenance, too! I know to never use another girl’s hair curler, even if it’s an emergency.

I also have the security deposit and first month’s rent ready to go.  
Let me know when I can come meet you!  
~Jess

 

From: Day.Jessica@laelementary.k12.edu

 

Re: Craigslist Ad

 

Hello,  
  
I believe my previous attempts at contact have gone to your spam folder, so I am trying my work email. I am writing regarding the property at 7652 Greenway Trail, Apartment 4D. Please return my message at your earliest convenience.  
  
-Jessica Day  
  
3rd Grade Teacher  
_______________  
“Slice off a piece of Day PIE- Parental Interaction Engagement”  
Jam Day Reminder- May 14th.  
<3 :-)

 

Please do not reply to this message. All replies will be automatically deleted. Direct contact with the staff member electronically is encouraged via the Teacher 2 Parent message app, available on our website: laelementary.edu/t2papp.html. All correspondence will be monitored and recorded.

 

From: Day.Jessica@laelementary.k12.edu

  
Re: Call Me  
  
Look, I know now you can’t write back to that email because you’re not in my address book. Just call me.  
  
986-765-2711  
  
Thanks.  
  
Jess

-Jessica Day  
  
3rd Grade Teacher  
_______________  
“Slice off a piece of Day PIE- Parental Interaction Engagement”  
Jam Day Reminder- May 14th.  
<3 :-)

 

Please do not reply to this message. All replies will be automatically deleted. Direct contact with the staff member electronically is encouraged via the Teacher 2 Parent message app, available on our website: laelementary.edu/t2papp.html. All correspondence will be monitored and recorded.

 

-

 

So naturally, Schmidt called her.

 

-

  
**Chapter One**

_The New Girl is Kryptonite at the Wedding._

 

They agreed to let her come see the place at 11 on a Saturday morning. Nick had enough time to throw on jeans and a hoodie, but not shower, before the potential new roommate was scheduled to arrive.

"Nick, are you decent?" Schmidt called out from the living room. "We are expecting that Day woman any moment." There was a pause, then he changed his tone. "God damn it! Youths have defaced my vehicle once again!"   
  
  
Nick leaned out to look down at the sidewalk to where Schmidt was parked. There was a Chinese food flyer pinned under his windshield wiper. "Buddy, that's just that really persistent delivery guy," Nick called back.  

Then, movement caught his eye. A short, brunette woman was standing outside the entrance doors to the building, pulling on the handle. She seemed perplexed that it wouldn't open easily, and spun around when an elderly man walked up behind her. She motioned toward the building, clearly indicating that she needed access; the old timer shook his head and kept ambling on. The woman bumped into the parking meter, and Nick turned away with a chuckle. He pulled up an article about the transmission of the rabies virus (research, always researching...) and settled down on the couch to wait, a kind of warm breakfast burrito in his hand.

“Hello?” a surprisingly deep voice called out in the hallway a few moments later.  
  
Schmidt and Coach exchanged a look while Nick carefully dropped his crumbs back into the burrito wrapper.

Schmidt answered the door with a sweeping motion.  
  
“Welcome to our home, Jessica!” he said, strangely formal. He took a meaningful gaze at her ass as she walked in. Coach raised his hand in greeting, and Nick turned. It was the woman from the sidewalk.  
  
Well, right off the bat, he knew there was going to be a problem, because Jessica Day was gorgeous. He didn’t consider himself a brunette guy, more a fan of blondes mostly, but she was pretty in a way that transcended “types”. Her red dress made her huge blue eyes pop even more, her bangs perfectly framed her face, and her petite figure was still curvy in all the right places. His heart skipped a beat just looking at her. Then her gaze met his and he knew this was never going to work. Because he saw something there in her eyes, too.  
  
He stayed in the kitchen as Schmidt disappeared with her into the other rooms, giving her a tour. He heard murmurs of appreciation and Schmidtty’s accompanying comments. Just as he finished his leftover Jamba juice, Nick heard them returning to the living room, and headed over to the couch where Coach was already waiting, his protein shake in hand, as Jessica took a seat opposite of the guys.  
  
“Do you have any pets?” Schmidt asked. Jessica sucked in a breath before beginning.  
  
“So you know in horror movies, when the girl’s like ‘Oh my god, there’s something in the basement! Let me just run down there in my underwear and see what’s going on in the dark?’ and you’re like ‘what is your problem? Call the police!’ And she’s like ‘okay!’ But it’s too late, because she’s already getting murdered. Well, uh… my story’s kind of like that.”  
  
Jess is a good storyteller. She uses a lot of facial expressions and gestures. It’s something that Nick, as a writer and a guy who doesn’t have a lot of expressions, can appreciate. Right now it’s something sad because she’s about to tell a bad story, but still.  
  
Apparently, she had walked in on her boyfriend cheating on her. Well, he’d walked in on her, and she’d been naked aside from a little bow, and a sexy song and dance routine, except he wasn’t naked, and he had another woman in their shared bungalow. The douchebag’s name was Spencer.

  
“So… that happened,” she finished her story with, awkwardly. “That’s why I need a new apartment. I’m sorry, what was the question again?” She looks flummoxed.  
  
“Do you have any pets?” Nick repeated the earlier question. What a story.

 

“No, I don’t have time for one, really. You know, it’s funny. When I saw your ad on Craigslist, I thought you were women.” Her tone kind of indicates she doesn’t think it’s really funny, more just weird. The guys laugh awkwardly back, Schmidt the loudest of the three. He suddenly dropped it and straightened, leaning forward.

“Wha-why would you think that?” he demanded. “That’s crazy.” Nick knew that this would happen. He gestures to his best friend smugly. She really has nice boobs, he notices. “Schmidt wrote the ad.”  
  
“I guess it was something about the words you used? It was like, uh- ‘sun-soaked’ and ‘beigey?’”  She uses air quotes and it’s rather adorable.

Schmidt goes into his default LA dirtbag mode and pulls off his blue sweater. Jess looks horrified, and Nick wants to deck him. “What are you doing?” he asks. It’s something he’s going to be asking a lot over the next few years. Schmidt leans back and gestures to his sculpted, hairless body. “What about these? Do these look beigey to you?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Nick apologizes. It’s just as well that this is all getting ruined because he couldn’t live with someone like that and not get himself into trouble.

Coach is proud of his work. “I’m his trainer, so uh, this is kinda the house that Coach built right here.” He gently slaps Schmidt’s abs. Somehow Jess hasn’t run out of the loft screaming yet, but her eyes have roughly doubled in size, so she probably will soon, Nick guesses.  
  
“What are we looking at here? This is baby smooth.” Nick doesn’t spend much time looking at his best friends’ abdominals, admittedly, but they are nice, in a weird way.  
  
“This is LLS. Ladies love Schmidt,” he proclaims.  
  
Apparently, that’s too far for Coach. “What?! What did you just say?” He gestures to the newly created Douchebag jar. Nick had gotten the idea from a parenting book he’d found on the bus. It worked kind of like a cuss jar, and he and Coach were trying to break Schmidt of his more douchey habits. Like flexing in front of pretty, potential roommates.

“Go put a dollar in the jar!” Coach snaps. “Right now!”

“Are you serious?” Schmidt intones.  
  
“Yeah, now!” Coach uses his coach voice. Schmidt gets up with a grumbled, “dammit.”

“LLS, what is wrong with you?!”  
  
Schmidt shoves a crumpled dollar into the jar, and as he does, Jess stands up.

“This place is beautiful,” she says brightly. “It gets so much light.” She looks down at the ground. “Spencer hated light…it’s hard to say his name.”

There’s something too familiar about the way her voice drops when she says her ex’s name. It is almost painfully familiar.  
  
Schmidt catches on as he puts his shirt back over his head. “It’s okay, Nick knows. He got dumped.” He smiles as he says it, because Schmidt hated Caroline, and was glad she was gone, something that Nick has only heard every day since the breakup and doesn’t care to be reminded of, not now especially, when someone else has just walked in their door.  
  
Nick rearranges his face to look skeptical, he hopes. “Dumped. Yeah, I got dumped.” So what if he had yelled at her while covering his ears, pretending it wasn’t happening? “Yeah, I got dumped. She dumped me. And I’m over it, okay? It was six months ago, guys.” He holds his arms out. “Get past it.” Jess is looking at him speculatively. It’s making him a little uncomfortable.  
“And I don’t know why we’re still talking about it. Why is everyone looking at me?!” He rests his head in his hands. He’s definitely not over it, but why does the pretty new stranger need to know this? And why is she looking at him with that look, part pity, part understanding? This is all so bad.

“You know what? I want to live here!” Jess declares. The guys walk up to her.

“Actually, I still have some questions,” Nick responds. “I mean like, no offense, but we barely know ya.” Why does he feel bad when she looks a little hurt?  
  
“Okay, yeah, so um… full disclosure, I’m kind of emotional right now, 'cause of the breakup, so, I’ll probably be watching Dirty Dancing at least six or seven times-”  
  
Nick’s eyebrows shoot up; Coach looks down at the counter, and Schmidt wants to laugh beside him.  
“- a day,” she finishes, and Coach makes his decision in that moment, it seems like a no.

“Um, I’m a teacher, so I uh- I bring home a lot of popsicle sticks, stuff like that, also I like to sing to myself. A lot.” She’s talking to all of them, but only looking at Nick for some reason. She does a little sing-song thing. “A lot.” Then she turns away, breaking eye contact when she sees the look on his face, which he is pretty sure is mean.

 

She turns the desperation up to eleven and says just the right thing, picking up one of Schmidt’s farmers market apples. “I’m tired of living with my friend. She’s a model. All her friends are models.” The apple owner lights up like a kerosene torch.

“How soon can you move in?” Schmidt asks eagerly. Nick has drifted down to the counter to avoid her damning gaze, because if he kept looking into this girl’s huge blue eyeballs, he was going to do something very stupid. He perks up at his best friends’ sudden query.

“Actually, Schmidt-”  
  
Coach firmly shakes his head. “Not happening.”

“Okay, uh- can you just give us a second? I gotta talk with my boys.” Schmidt is shining with glee and thumps his chest with his fist, and Nick groans. “My boys is not a thing around here,” he says, lest she believes that he’s as douchey as the other two. Because he knows that since Schmidt pays the lion’s share of the rent, if he wants Jess in, she’s in. The rest is just semantics, and he has to figure out how he’s gonna live with her. “Okay, douchebag jar,” he adds, and Jess watches them walk into the community bathroom.  
  
Schmidt is insistent, even though Coach has an excellent argument about testicle aeration requirements. They end up pressuring him too much, and Nick retreats into his hood, where it’s dark and he doesn’t have to think about the impending disaster about to enfold them all. When he hears her happily cry “Yay, I’m in!”, he jumps a little.  
  
“You are not gonna regret this,” she promises. Sadly, it’s a promise she can’t keep.

She moves in the next day. Somehow, she gets Coach’s room, which was right across from Nick’s; he decides he wants to be as far away from their new roommate as possible, and takes the smallest, newest room, since he’s planning on moving out as soon as he gets a promotion anyway, and says it’s a good way to prep for his big move and purge all the stuff he doesn’t need. Nick ends up with a lot of it, because seriously, he was just going to put a perfectly good clock in the dumpster? Like she promised, once her twelve big handbags full of clothes are tossed into the room, she leaves, comes back with two big Russian men who carry in a bed, some boxes, and a dresser, and then disappear, and then parks her butt on the couch and puts on Dirty Dancing. Then she starts to cry. A lot. She doesn’t even move her boxes into her room.  
  
She only pauses this routine to go to work or somewhere else, which he assumes is the model’s place, because other than sleeping in her new room for about six hours that happen to coincide with his bar shifts, she just cries on the couch. She amasses an alarming number of tissues which she gathers into big trash bags and throws on top of the stuff Outside Dave doesn’t take from Coach’s castoffs.  
  
On Friday, all the guys happen to be home at the same time in the afternoon and end up gathered on the edge of the living room, looking at her. There’s a little red bow at her feet that Nick suspects played a starring role in her story of Spencer’s betrayal, though why she would keep such an object is beyond him.  
  
“What have you done, Schmidt?” he asks softly.  
  
Later, he’s walking into the kitchen and wondering if he should do laundry, since he hasn’t washed this hoodie in at least a month. She’s curled on the couch, a takeout container of his Chinese by her head, talking on her phone.

“I’ve got to go, Mom,” she says when she hears him coming. “No, I’m not watching Dirty Dancing.”  He rubs his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping well with her around. Probably something to do with the constant, heart-rending sobbing coming from his living room.  
  
“No, I don’t think so.” She looks up at him through her dorky turtle shell-framed glasses. “Hey, are you gonna murder me cause you’re a stranger I met on the internet?” She covers the bottom of her phone who her mother doesn’t hear that last part.  
  
Nick doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes I am,” he says darkly.  
  
“He says no,” she says gently, curling back into the corner. “No, look, I gotta go, love you. Bye!” Schmidt and Coach burst in the front door just as she hangs up.  They have some crazy plan to get into the Wild West party, and Schmidt wants him to call Caroline. Nick hushes him. He hasn’t written anything in days, and it’s mostly her fault. What with the sniffles and general depression. He hasn’t even had the will to open his laptop.  
  
He gestures wildly to the woman on the couch who has just begun singing the damn song again.  
  
“We are in this situation because of you.” Jess punches the pillow, her ragged voice cursing Spencer’s name. “It has been a week of this madness. I’m goin’ crazy Schmidt, I can’t take it.” It’s way too much like himself, but with more musical drama.

Coach pulls out his confident face he uses to pick up women at bars. “You know what? I got this.” He approaches Jess. “Hi Coach,” she says sweetly, as he sits down in the chair across from her. He points and scolds her like a puppy that’s just peed on the carpet. “Stop it! Stop!”

Her wails renew, at a higher pitch than Nick has heard before. He watches as Schmidt tries. He takes the remote from her, and turns off the movie. She gestures with annoyance as he tells her sarcastically that she looks fantastic.  He invites her out for a chance at finding a rebound. Nick edges closer to study his method when she starts to warm up to the idea. When she makes a really bad Lord of the Rings reference, Nick starts to realize that Jess is actually a very pretty _nerd_ .  
  
And then there’s more singing, for some ungodly reason.  
  
“Wait, did you just make up a theme song for yourself?” Nick wonders.

-

Schmidt is still desperate to go to the stupid party. Nick is beginning to wonder why they always do what he wants. What Nick wants to do is enjoy his rare Saturday night off from the bar, and stay home and look at weird things on his computer. Alone. For research purposes. But for now, he needs to shower. Except Jess is already in there, so now he’s got to wait.  
  
“Somebody’s in here,” she calls out, as Schmidt makes a vaguely racist reference to the Cherokee nation.

“We’re leaving in ten minutes, did you shave your legs?” his roommate asks.  
  
“I will now,” she responds. She will even do both sides! Horray. This is what life has come to.

“Right, I’m gonna go kill myself now,” Nick stage-whispers.  
  
“Just call Caroline. You call her all the time when you’re drunk.” Okay, so maybe he does, but he remembers how much she loves Jude Law, and when he is a few drinks in, Nick sounds exactly like him. Even Winston has said it’s almost scary how much they sound alike!

“I’m not calling her!” he hisses, as Jess draws back the curtain. She’s wearing a bright pink one-piece bathing suit that he’s pretty sure she stole out of a 1980’s catalog of fashion mistakes, with a pink towel wrapped around her waist. She wears many shades of pink, really. Even her toenails are pink.  
  
“...then maybe, you’ll find a girl to motorboat you right back,” she says.  
  
“I don’t think she knows what motorboating is,” Nick laughs.  
  
-  
  
They end up at his bar, of course, because where else would he rather be than at his own damn job? He hands out their drinks at Schmidt and Coach’s favorite booth, the one in the corner where they can successfully wedge girls until they muster up the bravery to ask them back to the loft. Jess orders a rose wine and the guys start with beer.

“Pink wine makes me slutty,” she confides. When a guy she thinks is cute walks by, she does this weird thing with her glasses, and as Schmidt tries to counsel her, Nick walks back to the bar thinking his chances have just improved significantly, because that guy was average with a capital A.

  
Unfortunately, some of Schmidt’s stupid corporate friends show up to the Griffin to remind him about the party, which gets him back to annoying Nick about calling Caroline. Which he’s not going to do!  
  
Jess ends up at the bar, three roses in with a plate of hot wings, sad like so many other girls he’s picked up across the counter.  
  
“Well, I guess I can’t hide my crazy,” she says flirtatiously. She wasn’t lying about the wine, apparently. “I don’t think you’re trying that hard,” he muses, drying a glass. She picks up a celery stick. “Well, I’ve never really been great at this stuff, so...I once sang “What if God was of us?” to a boy I had a crush on at a party. I was 13. I provided my own acoustic guitar accompaniment. He begged me to stop.” Nick grimaced in sympathy.  
  
“Look at us, couple of losers. We both got dumped. Geesh.” She’s giving him those funky eyes again.

“I’m fine. It was six months ago, so…” his voice has gone all soft and weird, though. And he looks at the glass in his hand instead of her.

“Do you know why she dumped you? I mean, she must have hurt you pretty bad.” They don’t know each other nearly enough to have this conversation, and certainly not when he’s stone cold sober and working.  
  
“No, it made no difference to me, I just wanted to set her trash cans on fire,” he snips back sarcastically.  
  
“So you weren’t always just like wondering, like, what was it? Was there something I coulda done differently?” She’s clearly back to just projecting on him. He shakes his head firmly.

“You know what happens to people who keep it all inside?” She counts off on her fingers. “They get old, and they get sad, and then they get weird, and then you’re the old man and you’re yelling at the kids who are running across your yard, and you’re telling them ‘Don’t run across my yard! My life’s filled with regret.’ You know, you can’t just pretend like it didn’t happen.” She holds her hands out, palms up, in a shrug, then knits them together again.  
  
Nick levels a stare at her. “Or I could pretend to be more like you, Jess. And live on a sparkly rainbow-” She starts to laugh at his description, which makes him smile back at her, “and drive a unicorn around, and just sing all the time.” Her grin is electric. “Yeah, I think you should sing all the time!”

“No, I was being mean! I’m not gonna do that, Jess.” She seriously needs to start understanding his dark sarcasm if this thing is gonna work, he thinks. Wait, what?  
  
“Why not? It’s fun!” she exclaims, her head in her palm, studying him.  
  
“...because I have a penis.” he explains. This triggers a song, of course.

“My name is Nick, I have a penis and I’m not gonna let any feelings out!” she sings, with some weird finger-gun-action thing and some high notes at the end. She’s impossible, honestly. She stays still as he leans into her face across the bar.  
  
“Okay, Jess? Your left boob is resting on a plate of chicken wings.”  
  
Their hands brush against each other and he looks down pointedly at her chest. “Yeah, I know,” she says. Before he can get to the point of why he was noticing the proximity of her cleavage to fried poultry, one of Schmidt’s idiots, Peter, comes swooping in and distracts both of them.  
  
Nick lets her go for her rebound and picks up his phone. He’s gonna just send a text to Caroline. Maybe if they go to the stupid party, he’ll find out what happened with his ex and get something he can tell Jess to help her through this Spencer thing. Though she seems to have found her rebound, as Peter breezes by and she breaks off back to the guys.  
  
“So what’s happening tomorrow, Sailor?” Nick teases.  
  
“You know what? You guys were totally right. I talked in short sentences, I didn’t sing, I laughed, I smiled, I said I need rebound sex and it totally worked, he asked me out!” She’s very proud, even though Nick thinks she probably could have spoken in long sentences, sung, frowned, or stayed mostly silent as long as she said she needed rebound sex, because she was a good looking woman and when was the last time you heard of an attractive woman having to beg for sex? Which was essentially what she’d done. But she was happy, so why rain on her parade, right?  
  
“Dinner. With food. Whoo, whoo!” She makes a little touchdown dance thing, and the guys congratulate her. “It’s Jess, she’s on fireeee!” She turned around, and the back of her dress had gotten stuck in her underwear, which was very large and very white. The guys opt to let her have her victory without any embarrassment.  
  
-

 

The next night, they meet Jess’ model friend, Cece.  
  
Cece is very tall, very slim, very large breasted, very hourglass-shaped, and has the kind of face that makes men want to buy her things and put her in expensive cars. Of course she does, because she’s a model. How she came to be friends with their pretty-but-dorky Jess is a story he’d love to hear sometime, but right now he’s kind of distracted, though not as much as Schmidt, because unlike Schmidt, Nick knows he doesn’t have a chance with her. He has a better shot at painting a beautiful view of the Grand Canyon than ever having a woman of Cece’s caliber so much as flick an errant eyelash in his direction. But that doesn’t mean he can’t admire the view (with an artist’s eye, of course).  
  
Schmidt butchers her name and Nick just rolls his eyes. They hear a crash from Jess’ room as she struggles with the shoes Cece brought over for her big date with Peter. Nick heard them as she came in. “Thanks, Cec! All I have here are flats, all the rest of my shoes are at Spencer’s. And I really need heels if I am going to a place this fancy. It’s bad enough I had my underwear hanging out half of the evening, thanks to these dummies-”

“I know it was cramped at my place, Jess, but three guys?”  
  
“Oh, they’re fine.”  
  
Now Schmidt was doing his best to prove how not fine they were, and Cece looked bored with his none-too-subtle preening. Nick reached for the jar. “Douchebag.”

Cece leans forward and hisses slowly at the three of them. “Listen to me, you guys. Jess is by far the best person that I know. So if you guys let anything happen to her, I’m going to come here and crazy murder you.” Her tone was deadly serious.  
  
Like the idiot he was sometimes known to be, Schmidt admits he didn’t hear any of it because he was too busy looking down Cece’s dress. Nick reaches for the jar again as Cece uncrosses her mile-long legs and stalks off toward Jess’ room.  
  
By the time they hear Cece’s heels clicking back down the hallway, Nick is back on his computer on the couch, and Coach and Schmidt are back at the table. They all look up just as Jess comes out, wearing Cece’s dress, stockings, and heels. She has her contacts in, and her hair is twisted up pretty with a few strands falling down tastefully, and elegant makeup makes her look less like Jess and more like the model her best friend is. She has her big bag under her shoulder and looks at Nick questioningly.

“Wow,” Coach says. Her eyes flick up to acknowledge him, then back down to Nick’s wondering gaze. She smiles and thanks him, and then bends her knees and does a funky celebration dance.  
  
“And then she does that,” Schmidt sighs in disdain.  
  
Jess fumbles into her bag for her phone. “I’m gonna text him and tell him I’m headed over.”

Nick’s heart sinks a little for her, in that moment. “Wait, have you been texting him?”  
  
“Is that bad?” she asks quickly.  
  
He frowns a little, because…

“No, it’s nice.” That’s the kind of thing he’d want, because he knows what she is like, because she just came out of a long-term relationship, and texting little updates is the kind of thing committed people in relationships do. The kind of stuff he and Caroline did, but that’s definitely not the kind of thing the terrible hookup-culture types do. So even though he’s a little worried on her behalf, he just tells her to have a good night. Because he really hopes she will.  
  
“This is gonna be great!” she says, with just a hint of false bravado.  
  
They get ready for the party right after she leaves with Cece; the only thing Nick is willing to put on, costume-wise, is a bandana around his neck, because that’s just practical: if he needs to hide his face from the security cameras, it’s right there. While Coach and Schmidt argue about their outfit choices, Nick approaches the security and asks after Caroline.

“Hey, Nick,” she says, turning when she hears his voice. Oddly enough, she’s got pretty much the same outfit on that Jess did, down to the elegant upsweep of her hair.

  
“Sorry I’m wearing this stupid thing,” he says, untying the bandana and approaching her. “Schmidt made me do it.” She gives a half-laugh. “Thanks for getting us in.”  
  
“Yeah, no problem,” she says easily. “Maybe to pay me back, you can stop prank-calling me.” She jabs her finger into his shoulder softly.  
  
“What?” he asks, like he has no idea what she’s saying, as she totally butchers his Jude Law impression back to him. “Man, you gotta figure that out, some crazy person’s calling you.”  
  
A beat passes. “You look nice, it’s good to see ya.” His eyes flick down to her necklace; it’s one he gave her, years ago. “Um, I think I’m almost finished out here, if you… do you wanna go grab a drink?” She gives him the kind of look she used to, a half-smile, and he feels something hook back into his belly like an eel chomping down. “Yeah,” he agrees, too easily. “Yeah, sure, let’s you and I just get a drink. And be normal about it.” He reaches back as they turn to head inside.  
  
But something inside him bites back. A little voice that is starting to sound familiar.  
  
“Actually, hold on. I’m sorry. I just, I- have to ask you something,” Nick says, arms up in the air around Caroline’s shoulders, the same plastered smile on his face. “So that one day I’m not an old man, filled with regret. But why did you dump me?” In this light, her eyes look as blue as Jessica’s.

Her valley girl voice that comes out when she’s put off makes an appearance. “Um...do- okay, are we doing this here?- Like, now?”  
  
He shrugs back. “Yeah. Why did you dump me?” It comes out so easily.  
  
She looks down at their shoes.  
  
“Um, honestly, I-” She struggles to find the words. “I didn’t even realize you cared about me until we broke up.”

Wow, that hurts, deeply. Of course he’d cared about her, he thought he was going to marry her, it had been almost four years of his life. They’d lived together! How could she think that? But if that was how she’d felt, maybe he could understand.  
  
“Okay,” he answers. So she wanted someone more demonstrative, he could do that. “Let’s get that drink,” he says.  
  
Schmidt’s friend Ben comes up with his buddy Peter in tow. “Well howdy there, _muchachos_!” He’s wearing a crappy straw cowboy hat. Peter has a lariat that looks like it was made of a granny’s glasses-keeper. And if Peter’s here, then-

“Hey, where’s Jess?” Nick demands. He walks away from Caroline. Peter scoffs. “Hey, dude, she texted me seven times. Like, long ones. I just wanted to hook up.” He spreads his arms like he’s being a reasonable person.  
  
Douchebag.  
  
“So is she waiting for you to show up?” Nick asks, looking between the two numbskulls. “Or did you call her.” He already knows the answer, but he asks anyway.  
  
“Yeah, that’s what I did. I called her!” Peter crows with mirth. They walk off into the party, laughing.  
  
Caroline steps back once they’ve gone.  
  
“Nick,” she says, clutching her phone. “Wanna get that drink?” She motions inside.  
  
He smiles sadly, understanding something. “No, I gotta go help a friend, Caroline.” He turns and makes eye contact with Coach and Schmidt as he heads back toward the uptown and the restaurant Jess is waiting at. Coach follows, but Schmidt tries to stop them. Nick reaches up and scrubs his fingers through the back of his hair under the blue streetlights, passing all the hopeful guests trying to get into the exclusive event. It’s been a week, only a week- what has this girl already _done_ to them?

He hears Schmidt’s authentic cowboy boots clicking on the pavement behind them as he breaks into a jog and knows that sometimes, Nick does get what he wants. Not often, but enough.

 

“It would probably be smart to get her number, for situations like this,” Schmidt pants as he catches up to them. They stop short in front of the glass doors of the restaurant, then breathe before heading inside. When the front desk girl tries to stop them, Nick starts shouting.  
  
“We’re here!” he bellows in the quiet restaurant. Schmidt and Coach come in right behind him, backing him up.  
  
“You’re all on a date?” The hostess points to Jess.  
  
“Yeah, we’re her boyfriends. We are reverse Mormons, one man just isn’t enough for her.” Nick nods to reinforce his point, then looks at Jess. There are tears in her eyes, threatening to spill down and ruin her fancy makeup. “Hey, Jess. That guy was a jerk.” He leans heavily on the back of the ornate, plush chair as the guys nod in agreement on either side of him. “Guy’s a clown.” He leans down. It was really a rather long jog, and those were the wrong shoes to do it in.  
  
Jess crosses her arms over her chest, touching her clavicle, and the tears get bigger. “You guys missed your party to come here, and...see me?”

Nick nods again, like it's obvious. “Yeah, we uh- we care about ya. We like ya,” he says, coming dangerously close to using a singular form of that noun considering he’s known this girl a week.  
  
“That’s so nice!” she sniffs, and Coach steps back. “What’s that, don’t-” Nick fights the urge to go across the table to her, a ridiculous urge really, instead just echoing, “don’t start cryin’..” his Chicago creeps in as his tone lowers. She spreads her napkin on her lap as her voice chokes up. “It’s cool, it’s very, very cool…”  
  
Nick leans toward her. “Come on, please?” he says gently; Coach goes back to dog trainer mode. Totally the wrong thing to do; her napkin is back out of her lap as she buries her face in the cloth, and Nick puts his arm back to quiet him. “It’s okay, hey, don’t cry-”  
  
It’s time to bust out the big guns. He grimaces; this isn’t going to be pretty.

 

“For I’ve, had, the time of my life,” he begins, singing horribly off-key.  
  
  
“What is he doing?” Coach asks, but Nick is looking at Jess as she raises her face up out of the napkin, her face amazed. “And I’ve never felt this way before,” he continues, looking away since he’s mortified. “Yes, it’s true…” Considering he’s heard the song 200 times in the last week, you’d assume he’d know it by heart by now, but the lyrics are failing him completely. “Na na na?” he sing-songs, whacking Coach in the stomach for some backup, because at least she’s not crying, even if she is looking at him like he’s lost his mind. “And it’s the song that makes you really really happy,” Nick sings, while Schmidt looks away, saying, “I’m not participating in this,” so Nick smacks him right in his rhinestoned belly. He abruptly belts out, “Just remember. You’re the one thing, I just can’t get enough of…”  
  
The hostess kicks them all out when Jess starts singing along, too. But then she’s laughing at that point, so it doesn’t even matter.

                                                                 ---  
  
A few weeks after the restaurant incident, Nick is getting used to having Jess around. The Dirty Dancing routine ceased completely after that evening, and she’s moved all her stuff into its proper place. Mostly he sees her in the mornings when she’s bustling around, getting ready for school, or on the weekends. Coach moves out on a Wednesday, and as it so happens, Winston returns from Latvia that following Friday night. He and Schmidt bring him straight to the Griffin to get re-acquainted with American alcohol, and somehow manage to not wake her when they stumble in, close to 4am. The next morning, she’s waiting when Nick comes out of his bedroom and into the kitchen, seeking coffee. She’s wearing a soft blue bathrobe and smearing cream cheese on a bagel. The bagel looks good.

 

“Let’s let him sleep,” he intones, reaching for half of it as she gently pushes his hand away.

“Guess I’m not the new kid anymore,” she says. “Just one of the guys.”

“You’re still the new kid,” he smiles. “Winston lived here before Coach did.”

“So Coach said that they used to play basketball together in college, but then Winston went _pro_?” Jess seems very impressed. Too impressed.

  
“In Latvia. He went pro in Latvia,” Schmidt interjects, on his way to his room. “It’s a big difference. The team logo is a fig. Just a fig. One, single fig.” He holds his arms wide.

Jess goes over for some coffee. Nick snags a bagel.

“Oh, you’re jealous. That’s so cute,” she teases.

“I’m not jealous of Winston, okay? There’s a big difference between us.” Schmidt defensively counters. “It’s been two years, he’s gonna have to recognize. I’m a lot flyer now. Wanna see me flex my bass?” For some reason, he pulls off his shirt- again. Despite Nick’s protests.

“Put your shirt on, it’s the morning,” Nick grumps. He looks at Jess for backup, but she’s finishing the breakfast tray he’d assumed was hers and carrying it off toward Winston’s new room.

“He’s gonna love it!” she stage whispers.

“Jess, what are you doing? What is she doing?” Jess uses her foot to kick open the door, then disappears. There’s singing. And then screaming.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me he was hung over!” Jess says, as they brush their teeth together.

“I totally told you he was hung over! I said he was drunk at the bar and now he’s passed out.”  
Winston comes in, and she begins to apologize to him, referencing Nick with finger guns when it comes to boundaries. Then violates all those boundaries by asking this strange man she just met if she can borrow one of his tank tops, saying they’re the same size.

\--

Schmidt offers her his lost and found collection of objects from his female conquests.  
  
“What have you done to me, Nick?” Winston demands as they leave.  
  
“I am so happy you’re back,” Nick responds emphatically. Naturally, Winston wants the big room back, which probably isn’t going to happen because of the whole paying-more-rent aspect of Schmidt’s finances, but his childhood best friend seems confident.  
  
Jess comes out of Schmidt’s room looking like a 13-year-old girl who raided her older, sluttier sister’s closet. She’s wearing a pink velour hoodie, a short black shirt, and mismatched hoop earrings.  
  
“Jess, I’ve been telling you this for weeks, but you’ve gotta call Spencer and you’ve gotta get your stuff back.” The skirt is actually kind of nice. Nick glances her up and down a couple more times, basketball poised in his hand. “Unless you’re scared.” He tosses the ball to Schmidt.  
  
“No, I am not scared. It’s just… complicated. That stuff was...that stuff was ours and…” her voices goes all high like it does when she’s about to cry. Schmidt distracts her by tossing the basketball at her. She does another weird song as she dribbles, and Winston gives him a significant look.  
  
“You get used to it,” Nick shrugs.

Then Jess tries to bounce-pass the ball back to Schmidt, and throws it a bit too hard.  
  
Right into Nick’s TV.  
  
“My bad. I’m sorry, you guys,” Jess shrinks, hiding her face in her hands.  
  
Nick examines the damage and declares it unrepairable. “That was my TV,” he says darkly.

“It’s kinda all he had,” Schmidt admits.

“I’ll get you a new one, I just can’t afford it right now,” she sits on the couch, ball in her lap.  
  
“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the plan?” Three men cannot live without a television.  
  
“You don’t know me like that, but I need a TV.” Winston seems to read his mind.

 

“Do you have a TV at Spencers'?” Nick asks, his face still disappointed and a little disgusted.

“Well, yeah, I do. It’s just really… big and thin…and bright,” she says sheepishly.  
  
“Go get it!” all three guys chorus.

“No, I can’t call Spencer, I haven’t talked to him since he cheated on me with that hoe!” she exclaims. “Actually, that’s not fair, she might be a really nice...hoe. I just don’t wanna get in a big fight with him, I wanna be friends with him again eventually…” she admits in an embarrassed tone.

“Why do you want to be friends with your ex?!” Nick yelps. “I don’t want to be friends with Caroline. And all she did was rip me open-” his voice drops, hurt seeping back into old wounds, “and tear out my heart with her perfect, perfect hands.” He drops his face to the floor.

“He has a power over me, it’s like he’s a wizard and I’m his mage...and I think it’s his hair, he has this like, really beautiful hair, and whenever I see it, I get the..woo, woos.” Jess finishes lamely.

“Oh my God, I hate my life.” No TV, no perfect-handed Caroline. What has Nick got, really?

 

Jess agrees to talk to Spencer about the TV. The guys head out for brunch as she dresses up pretty and heads to the park.

-  
  
Nick’s trying to watch a baseball game on his phone when Schmidt drops down and starts talking about the power dynamics in the loft. Nick wonders if the baseball is even a single pixel wide on the one-and-a-half inch square screen. Probably not.

Jess and Cece step into the living room and head right for the couch. The guys ask what happened with Spencer, and the TV. Jess’ face stuff is all runny- she’s been crying again.

 

“I mean, seriously? You guys told her to call Spencer? That is not your job. That is my job!” Cece snaps.

 

“All right, so what happened?” Nick questions. Jess sits next to him on the couch.  
  
“He needed a ride to the airport,” she sighs.

“What?!” he demands incredulously.

 

“For his new girlfriend…”  
  
“Are you kidding me?!”

Stunned and outraged reactions from everyone, even Cece.

“And I’m supposed to pick her up next Sunday,” she concludes.

 

“Oh, my God, Jess.” Nick feels bad for her, and a little annoyed, but mostly he feels empathy. He knows her problem all too well.  
  
Her big, tear-filled eyes look into his. “What’s wrong with me?”  
  
He taps her shoulder. “I’ve figured it out. This guy’s your kryptonite.” She considers this. “You need to stand up and you need to fight him.”

 

“I tried! I tried to fight him, but I can’t. I’m powerless.” She looks defeated.  
  
“Cause you’re not ready to let him go,” Nick advises. “I think you know, deep down, once you get your stuff back, it’s over, over.” She swallows, then looks over at Cece. Her friend speaks again.  
  
“I can’t believe I’m actually gonna say this, but I agree with him.” Schmidt and Winston nod along as well. But Jess doesn’t wanna hear it. “No, you guys are wrong. I really, really wanna move on.” She keeps her eyes closed as she lies. “Then you’ve gotta fight,” Nick counters, and she looks at him again. “I wanna fight,” she agrees. “Then get mad!” he says. “I wanna get mad!”  
  
He grabs the pillow out from between them and rises to his feet. “Then do this. Pretend this is Spencer’s face. Punch it.” She looks down at the pillow, up at him, then back at the pillow. He holds it by the edges, ready. “Get it.”

 

She gives it a little thump.

 

“Come on, do it again.” She hits it a little harder. “Punch it like a man,” he encourages. She really whacks it, a couple of times. “Harder than that!” She pulls back and partly gets him in the ribs, but he puts the pillow back up. “Come on, Jess!” Cece calls. “Come on, Jess, you’re angry! Good!” She’s full on beating the pillow now. “That’s dancing. That’s punch-dancing. He broke your heart. He did terrible things to you, you hate him!” She’s trying to wrestle the pillow from his grip, and Schmidt looks a bit concerned, as the pillow was probably from Crate and Barrel and worth a month’s rent.

“I’m mad!” Jess cries.  
  
“Good!” He answers.  
  
“I’m bad!” She gives one more whack and their eyes meet again.

“You’re ready,” he says. “Go get your stuff.” She disappears in a flurry of black curls and swirling red skirt. Then reappears and asks them to come with her, since it’s a lot of stuff and most of it is heavy.  
  
They all load into her car, an old blue Volvo hatchback. He takes shotgun since he’s being her life coach. She cranks up some 80’s thrash punk stuff, the kind of music he tried to like in high school to seem cool but actually preferred more mellow things like Bob Marley. He gives her advice on what to say, and tells her to say less “buddy” and more “jerk or idiot”.  
  
“Mr. Crabs!” she says, as an insult.  
  
“Mr. Crabs is an option,” Winston says sarcastically from behind him. Cece and Schmidt are crammed in the backseat with him.  
  
Spencer and Jess’ place is a beautiful old Spanish ranch in the valley. She pulls up to the curb, then pulls away.

The thrash punk goes off as they do six laps of the block. Jess starts singing along to “Save the Best for Last,” pulls up, throws the car in park and storms out, jabbing the doorbell with fury.

A very tall, skinny guy answers the door, pulling his shaggy brown hair into a man bun. Nick’s pretty sure he has the same outfit in different colors. “ _That’s_ the wizard? He’s wearing a scrunchie.” This guy seems so… average.

 

Jess and Spencer have a murmured conversation, then he pulls her stiff form to his chest for an awkward half-hug. She raises her arms to encircle him, then sees the wilted flowers in the pot beside the door. She throws them, filled with rage, onto the lawn, then dashes into the house as the car voices their appreciation. They can hear Spencer yelling, and Nick worries. “Is she gonna be okay in there?” She emerges, carrying old lady purses, a dozen hats on her head, staggering under the weight of the TV. “She looks like Helena Bonham Carter,” Nick groans. When she tosses the TV aside to get her shirt off his body, the others quickly unload from the car.

 

Nick runs up and grabs her around the middle as she starts to forcibly yank the edge of Spencer’s shirt off. He carries her backward, and she’s really tiny. He knew she was short, but she’s barely any weight in his arms. “Who are these guys?” Spencer demands, and she mumbles, “they’re my roommates.” Nick puts her down and starts loading the pile of stuff into the trunk; Winston’s already got the TV.  
  
“No, you gave this to me, I want to keep it,” Spencer says a little sadly, as Nick walks back, his hands going to his hips.

“Give her her T-shirt, man.” He’s using his dealing-with-drunks bartender voice.

“No, I don’t want to. And I gave her this hat, too, so I’m gonna take this back.” He reaches for an ugly knit thing; Nick snatches it away. “This one?”

 

“Yeah,” Spencer says, as Nick pulls back. “You want that?” He puts the red hat on his head. “Then I dare ya. Come take it off my head, pal.” He squares up again, pulling back the sleeves of his shirt. They take a measure of each other while Jess stares Spencer down defiantly. “I dare ya,” Nick says again.

 

Schmidt takes one of the hats and puts it on in solidarity. Winston says they look ridiculous.  
  
“Look, dude, give her the shirt back,” Nick growls. “I bet she worked hard on that Jam-boree.”  
  
“Yeah, it’s a play on words,” Jess says. “Jam-boree!”

“Jam,” Nick mumbles, and Schmidt steps up. “Girl made a lotta jam, Spence. You know how time-consuming that can be?” He starts listing off ingredients until Nick mutters to stop.

“You live with these people, Jess?” Spencer says frantically. “Seriously?” He steps toward Nick. “You can say here until you find a better place to live.”  
  
“You know what? I don’t like you, Stretch.” Nick’s eyes are almost completely obscured by the hat, but he continues. “I don’t like anything about you, and I’m not afraid to-”

Jess holds up her hand. “I’ve got this.” Nick turns and smiles at her.  
  
“I’ve got a place to live, Spence. It’s over. I spent six years trying to figure you out, but all you are is a guy with really beautiful hair. I’m happy you cheated on me. Thank you. Because, if you hadn’t, I would have married you, and then you would have hurt me all over again. And yeah, I was scared to start over. I didn’t know what to do. And yeah, I’m living with three guys I met on the internet. And yeah, stranger danger is real. But I love these guys.” Nick looks over and swallows perceptible. “I barely know them, I just met him-“ she points to Winston- “but I love them.”

“I would just take it easy with the love stuff,” Nick intones, and Schmidt and Winston agree.  
  
“All of them,” Jess says firmly, waving them off. Winston impulsively leans down and sticks one of the hats on his head. It has a pretty pink flower in the middle. “Give her the shirt back, man.” He says.

 

Fearfully, Spencer asks “What happens if I say no?”  Schmidt steps up. “You know what happens? Schmidt happens!” He slaps the wizard. “What was on your hand?!” Spencer cries in pain. “Thumb ring, bitch!” Winston pulls him back as Nick starts grabbing up the rest of the hats and piling them into the trunk. Cece comes out with Jess’ bicycle, loaded with more belongings.

 

“You know what, fine! Here!” Spencer pulls off the shirt and tosses it to Jess. “Take it!” Cece throws the bike bell at him.  
  
“You know, I thought we were gonna handle this like adults, Jess,” Spencer chides.  
  
“Yeah, well, I thought you were the love of my life, so… suck it, Mister Crabs.” Nick gives her a fist-bump as she carries the rest of the stuff to her car.

-

They carry all the stuff up to the loft, including the TV, which, unfortunately, had part of the base snapped when Jess threw it down on the grass. Nick gets out a roll of duct-not-duck tape and starts putting all the bits back where they probably belong. Jess hovers nearby, wearing the Jam-boree shirt. It looks much better on her than it did on Spencer.  
  
“I can’t believe I got all my stuff back,” she says in her low, rose-wine tone.  
  
“You did, but most of it’s broken.” Nick wraps more tape around the base of the TV, frowning.  
  
“Yeah, it is broken, but… I dunno… It’s mine.” She smiles down at him.  
  
“Yeah, but it’s broken.” Probably reparably broken, unlike _his_ TV, but whatever. He pushes the power button in, and the screen turns on. Kind of fuzzy and with some lines through it, but watchable. “Hey, look at that. I think it’s working.” He holds up his hand and Jess high-fives him.  
  
“Oh my God, it’s a TV! Yay!” They settle into their spots in the center of the couch, and Jess puts her feet up. “I’m gonna make so much jam…”  
  
“Please don’t.”  
  
“We’re gonna have a jam sesh!” she sing-songs.  
  
“Absolutely not.” Nick grimaces as the TV screen tilts to the left. After listening to her abysmal DVD collection choices, he and Winston head to the bar while pretending they don’t know that Schmidt stayed behind to watch Curly Sue.

 

                                                                ---

  
  
  
When the invite to Steve and Bree’s wedding falls off the refrigerator three weeks after Jess moves in, Nick has the brilliant idea to bring her as his plus one.

“Caroline and I RSVP’d to this like a year ago, and it’s local.” Nick says, the Thursday before. “If you’re not busy Saturday, can you come?” Jess is eating cereal out of a Minnie Mouse bowl, and bats her eyelashes. “And I’m guessing you expect Caroline to show up?”  
  
“She was sorority sisters with Bree, so probably. I know Bree knows about the breakup, she awkwardly referenced it the last time I ran into her at Best Buy.” Nick sighed. “Look, it would really help if you could pretend to be my girlfriend. I have to prove I’m over her.”

“Even though you’re clearly not?” Jess asks.  
  
“I’m so over her. Are you in or not?”

“Oh, I’m in. And I have the perfect outfit idea.”  
  
So that’s how Nick finds himself in a wedding getup, his hair slicked back like a 1930’s gangster (using Schmidt’s ridiculous artisanal hair product), sitting on Jess’ flowered hippie bedspread. Schmidt is stretched out behind him, propped up on an elbow and ready to judge Jess’ outfit. For a straight man, he has a surprisingly queer eye for ladies’ wear.  
  
Jess is padding in and out of her closet in a soft blue bathrobe, her hair pulled up and arranged some fancy way that makes her look like a starlet. Her makeup is glamorous and makes her giant eyeballs look even bigger, somehow. She comes out of her closet with some dresses under her arm.

“It’s our first wedding together, so we need nicknames.” She points to Nick, looking him up and down, pointer finger raised. “Nick is Knickknack- or Mister Suspenders.” She smiles at her own wit. Nick can only shake his head in horror, looking at her with the disconcerted expression that has moved onto his face a lot lately. Schmidt immediately turns it down. “No nicknames. Alright? Your only job tonight is to be Nick’s girlfriend. Okay? And make sure he stays out of trouble with Caroline.”  
  
“Why can’t you and Winston help?” she asks, turning back to the closet.  
“Believe me, we’ve tried.” Schmidt gestures, his voice holding a disappointed and sarcastic tone. “He doesn’t listen to us anymore.”  
  
Nick is painfully reminded of sitting in his room, wearing Caroline’s clothes, sobbing over a photo while Schmidt told him she wasn’t coming back. It is not the best memory, and one he wishes Schmidt wouldn’t share.

“He’s right, I don’t.” Nick interjects quickly.  
  
Jess parades out of the blue closet, holding a hideous dress aloft. It might be made of the same flowery pattern as the hideous hippie comforter below his ass. She presents it to them with a triumphant little noise. Nick’s eyes bulge out in horror, and Schmidt holds out his hand firmly. “NO.”  
  
“That is the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen,” Nick says, waving his fingers around for emphasis. He feels only a little terrible as her face falls. “Jess…”  
  
Schmidt swoops in. “I’m really gonna need you to step it up tonight, okay? When I see you, I wanna be thinking…’who let the dirty slut outta the slut house?’”  
  
Jess recovers quickly, responding in a terrible British accent. “Pro’bably the slut but’lah.” Her teeth are weirdly prominent. Nick has a bad feeling about this whole plan. Jess disappears back behind the door.  
  
Winston pops his head in. “Let’s go, I can’t be late. I am -in- the wedding.”

Thankful for a distraction, Nick turns his ire toward his other best friend. “You’re the usher. So relax.”  
  
“Yeah, I’ll be busy. That way I don’t have to sit around answering a bunch of stupid questions all day. Like, ‘do you have a job?’ ‘Are you still playing basketball?’ Does it look like I’m still playing overseas basketball?” Nick drops his face into his hands halfway through Winston’s rant. For a weekend day off from the bar, this day is actually turning out to be horrible. Granted, it had already been bad, because he had to wake up before noon, but seriously?  
  
“What is the matter with you?” Schmidt demands.

“This is the first job I’ve had in like, two months, dude. And I really wanna just get in there and ush this wedding in the FACE!” Winston is still totally serious.  
  
“You’re gonna be great, man,” Schmidt reassures him. Winston vanishes back into the hallway.  
  
Jess reappears, pushing her sleeves up and still not dressed. “So when we do the chicken dance, I do it a little bit differently.” Nick frowns at her strangeness. “I know that it usually goes like- duh duh duh duh duh duh dut- oh!” She corrects herself. “Duh duh duh duh duh duh dut, mmmhmm.” She wiggles her hips, staring off into the distance. “But instead of doing claps, I like to do a peck.” She demonstrates. “Cause it’s more realistic.”

The head motion for her peck puts many extremely dirty thoughts into Nick’s head. But naturally, she’s innocently oblivious. “No chicken dance!” Nick snaps.  
  
“Okay, look, we’re not trying to be mean. We just don’t want you to be yourself,” Schmidt says. “In any way.”

Jess’ face is incredulous, and Nick thinks she’s probably about to tell them where to go. “Okay. Suppress the Jess.” She turns back and heads into the closet. “Got it.” She does the saddest finger guns at the two of them.  
  
Schmidt taps him on the shoulder. Nick turns.  
  
“Did you use my hair gel?” he asks.  
  
“Did I use your hair gel?” Nick tries to play it off like it’s the dumbest thing he’s heard today.  
  
“I’m not gonna be mad. Just let me know if you did.”  
  
Nick snorts. “No.”  
  
Schmidt isn’t fooled. “Sure?”  
  
“...I used your hair gel.”  
  
“Are you serious?” Schmidt asks disgustedly. “Yeah, it’s-” Their argument is interrupted by Jess emerging from the closet.

  
She’s wearing a little purple dress that hugs all the right places. It only has one strap for sexy reasons, Nick guesses. His eyebrows shoot up, looking at her.  
  
“Who let the dirty slut out of the slut house?” Schmidt says in dazed wonder.

“Wow. You look great.” Nick lets his eyes wander up and down her body a few times. She looks at them over her shoulder, then draws back her upper lip.  
  
“Let’s go knock bishcuts, brudder cousins!” She’s ruined it with some cheap vinyl redneck teeth.

“NO.” Schmidt immediately jumps off the bed and hastens to exit.  
  
“No teeth, Jess! You can’t wear prop teeth!” How is this woman 28 years old and trying to pull this? He rises up to leave too.

“Come on guys, these are hilarious. Kids love these!” Jess argues.

They’re at the lobby of the hotel where the wedding is happening. Jess is fiddling with her dress.  
  
“Wanna know one of my beauty secrets?” she asks. Nick guides her through the hall, Schmidt on his left, Winston on his right. “The only way I could fit in this dress is by wearing little girl’s bicycle shorts underneath.” She flashes them. “They are tight. I won’t be peeing tonight-” she sings, stopping abruptly. “Oh my god, bubbles-” She beelines for the favor table. Nick grabs her arm just in time.  
  
“Nononono, no bubbles, Jess. No bubbles, no bubbles, please.” Her crestfallen look says it all. He slides his hand down and hooks her arm in his as Schmidt proclaims that there’s a lot of big game here tonight.  
  
A pretty blonde, Brooke from their alma mater, and two brunettes walk past. “Who’s Brooke?”  
  
Nick turns to explain. “He’s been into her since freshman year. She used to get drunk and pass out on our porch. It was like having a hot, alcoholic cat.” Schmidt watches her pass with a predatory gaze. “I’d always leave water out for her. Okay, tonight just got real.” Nick claps him on the back supportively. “She goes on top of the kill list,” his buddy says confidently, watching Brooke blend back into the crowd.  
  
Jess looks disturbed. “Is that because...you’re gonna attempt to kill her, by having sex with her?” she wonders. Nick smirks, and Schmidt turns to follow Brooke, parting with a flippant, “More or less.”  
  
“Oh Schmidt, one day, you’re gonna kill the nicest girl!” Jess chides.  
  
They make their way to the outdoor ceremony area, where classy little white chairs are lined up in neat rows behind an arched white fence-thing. Nick drops her arm and she turns to face him, straightening his lapels and smoothing down his tie. It’s strangely normal, like he didn’t _not_ know her a month ago, and Nick is aware of how close her body is to his. He shifts uncomfortably.

“Look at my new boyfriend,” she says in a weird, haughty voice. “So fancy in his big boy tie.” He tries unsuccessfully to bat her hands away twice.  
  
“Jess, would you please just stop?” Nick says in a strained voice. He scans the crowd for Caroline’s blonde hair.  
  
She loses the voice. “Okay, what is it with Caroline? It’s like you’re a different person.” He meets her eyes and wants to ignore the undercurrent of concern he sees there. He looks away, then back at her. “Just- focus on getting through today. Please?” God knows that’s all he’s trying to accomplish.     
  
“Oh-kay, Mister Boy-T-Friend.” The voice is back. “What did I tell you?” Nick squares his shoulders, glaring. She gives a mock laugh. “Hah. Don’t be myself.”

“Yes.” It comes out a little low, kind of weird. She makes his voice do strange things, sometimes.  
  
“That’s what I love about our relationship. You never let me be myself!” she deadpans, and turns away, striding into the crowd to find their seats. He follows her with a sigh.

Schmidt hands them glasses of champagne from a tray, looking over their shoulders, groaning. “Oh no, no, not tonight!” Nick and Jess turn to follow his gaze. “No!”

“Who is that?” Jess asks.  
  
“It’s Gretchen Nelson. She’s a terrible person. We can’t stand each other. At every wedding, we end up-” he drops his voice, embarrassed. “-we end up having sex.”  
  
Nick’s face is disgusted; Jess’ is speculative, and shows no hint of surprise. Schmidt defends: “I mean, look- the sex is amazing. Oh, she’s coming over-”  
  
Nick slides his hand around Jess’ waist and pulls her away.  “Hey, there are those people that we know!” he says brightly, and Jess answers, in the same tone, “Ooh, what people?” They abandon Schmidt to his screwed-up relationship failings. Winston ushers them into their seats.

Caroline sits down seconds later, just down the row. She looks over at him, smiling broadly as she recognizes him. Nick panics. “There she is, there she is- she’s right over there-” He’s halfway out of his seat as Jess pulls him firmly back down, her arms wrapped around his right shoulder. “She’s right over here, she’s-” He rises and she pulls him back down again. He leans into Jess’ face. “Just be cool, just be totally cool,” he prays aloud. Jess murmurs, “Okay.”  
  
He turns away just as he feels her presence behind him. “Hi!” Caroline smiles down at them. Nick looks back, a fake grin plastered on his face, leaning back into Jess. She wraps herself around his shoulder like a python, draping her weight on him and leaning in close, her hand up by her chin. Deciding this isn’t close enough, she slips her hand down and closes it over his, pulling his arm up and around her fluidly, saying smoothly, “Nicholas, you have to introduce me!” He tries to follow her lead, pulling her in and angling his body to accommodate hers. She brings both her hands up to caress the one draped over her neck, looking up at Caroline sweetly. “Yeah, of course,” he says easily. “Jess, this is Caroline.”

“Hi,” Caroline says again, looking at them awkwardly. Her smile is as fake as his. She holds down her hand, inviting a girlie handshake from Jess, who reaches up to touch her fingers to Caroline’s. “Kara Lee?” she asks, sliding her palm across the other womans'. His ex corrects her politely. “Uh- Caroline.” Jess acts like she didn’t hear her, and says, “Caraloo? Cara- Coraline?”

Nick sees what she’s doing, and stops it with a snapped “Carol-INE”. She looks at the hard set of his jaw and pulls away slightly. “Ooh. Kay, fancy.” She gives him a look, then turns her attention back to Caroline. “Well, I’m Nicholas’ girlfriend, we just started dating so we’re still in that honeymoon phase…” she trails off, looking back and leaning in so close that Nick laughs awkwardly. “I barely sleep. So much doing it!” Nick looks up at Caroline warily. “So much doing it, it’s crazy.” Jess leans over him, tucking her head halfway under his, reaching up and stroking along his jawline. He blinks and gulps, looking away, feeling guilty for lying, for enjoying Jess’ innocent, made-up-story-touch. “He’s so soft, like a towel!” she exclaims girlishly.

Caroline swallows, too. “Well, it was nice to meet you,” she says lamely. Jess scoots back on her chair again. “So nice to meet you too, Carol.”  
  
His ex-girlfriend can’t hide her annoyance this time. She gestures in the air. “...Caroline.” Jess fake laughs, “I give up.”  
  
“I guess I’ll...see you later.” Caroline looks down at them briefly, then turns and leaves. “For sure, for sure, for sure…” Nick mumbles, unsure why he says repeats things at awkward moments. Caroline gives them one last backward look as she shuffles back down the aisle to her seat.  
  
Nick turns to Jess excitedly. “Oh my God, was she jealous!?” Jess smiles back at him, leaning down to dig in her purse as he compliments her. “You did so good. That was remarkable…”  
  
Jess smiles up at him brightly, the prop teeth in her mouth. “I jus done’t what mah mamma learnt me,” she says. The smile vanishes from Nick’s face. They’re already back to square one.  
  
“Give me the teeth,” he says, holding out his hand. Jess spits them sheepishly into his palm.

After the incredibly long and mostly boring ceremony, which Nick spends imagining who would win in a three-way fight between a lion, a tiger, and a cheetah, the crowd makes its way inside for the reception while the happy couple poses for three thousand pictures with all the members of their families in various combinations. An hour later, he and Jess are deeply engrossed in an ethical discussion regarding whose turn it was to restock the community cookie jar, with Nick insisting that his dollar store Chips a Choc were almost as good as Jess’ homemade ones, almost better because they were harder and therefore that much better for cleaning your teeth, almost like dog biscuits really, when Winston hopped up.

“This kid is pushing my buttons,” he snarls, leaving his chair. “Winston, he’s just a little boy! Relax!” Nick calls after him. Schmidt slides into the empty seat for a moment, muttering, “If Brook asks, I’m six months clean and sober, and looking to settle down.” He leaves without explaining. As if that’s a perfectly normal part of a conversation.

Jess suddenly starts playing with his hair, mussing it up with her slim fingers. “Great, Schmidt’s sober.” He angles his face to look at Jess, who brings her other hand up to frame his face, looking into it adoringly.

 

“What are you doing?” he asks. She pushes his head to face the other direction and puts her arms around his neck, and he leans back into her again. “She’s looking at us,” she mutters. Caroline catches his eye and gives him a little wave and smile that Jess returns. Nick fakes another smile, dropping it as he turns back to face Jess. She reaches up, examining him like she’s checking him for bugs or something. She has a painfully tight grip on his jaw, denting in one of his cheeks as he grimaces. She’s smiling as she swirls the hair around his crown. “Your head is shaped like a yam,” she wonders.  
  
Without missing a beat, he responds, “Yeah, I know. I can’t wear soft hats.” “Uh-huh,” she says, all breathy, back. She pulls him close again, and he says, “Hey, when she comes here, I want to talk to her by myself.” Jess doesn’t loosen her grip. “No. Are you sure?”

Nick responds firmly, pulling away a bit. “Jess, I’m fine. For real.” When had they gotten this comfortable in each other’s personal space? And how can he get her uncomfortable again? Because he’s seen that look in Caroline’s eyes, the sad look she gets when she’s feeling lonely, and it is pulling up old fuzzy feelings. Feelings he thought were dead but are apparently now zombies because they are staggering up and looking for brains to infest and his is like, right there. And then there’s about ten percent of his brain that is really enjoying this fake relationship too much, and wondering how long Jess will keep it up if he asks her to because being this wrapped up with her feels so deliciously natural. But he’s trying firmly to shut up that ten percent, because Jess is also the same person whose prop teeth are digging into his chest through his suit jacket.  And their new roommate, whom he had signed a no-nail oath regarding not ten nights earlier.

Caroline saunters over and is grinning at him again. “Hi.” She rolls her eyes playfully. “Could that ceremony have lasted any longer?”

Nick shrugs. “It was…” Jess interrupts, snuggling in again. Her cheek brushes against his and he closes his eyes briefly. “Ha ha. We loved it. Taking notes in case Mr. Commitment-phobe here-” she points a finger-gun so close it nearly pokes him-”decides to make an honest woman outta me.”  
  
Caroline nods vaguely and says “oh,” under her breath. Nick can’t take the pain in her eyes anymore. “Hey, Jess,” he says loudly, leaning forward and away from her. She looks at him intently, reading his eyes. “Did you want to go do that thing, from…”

She stands up quickly, not breaking eye contact. “Yes, I did. I want to do it very badly. Yup.”

“Thank you,” Nick says quietly, gratefully, as Caroline takes Winston’s seat. Jess disappears into the party toward the dance floor.

 

Unfortunately, just as she makes her way to a corner, the DJ decides it’s time to introduce the newly married couple. A spotlight suddenly lights up her stricken face as she acts like she’s a drunken town crier. He aches with her embarrassment. Even Caroline almost looks sympathetic.  
  
“Jess is… great,” she says.  
  
“The best,” he agrees. “Yeah. So happy.”  
  
“Are you guys pretty serious, or?” Caroline asks with a small smile. Nick gets the drowning feeling he’s been associating with this woman for four years. He lifts his eyebrows and smiles back. “Yeah, we are pretty serious. Yeah, we live together.”

Caroline’s mouth makes a little ‘o’ of surprise. He clarifies. “I mean, different bedrooms, but shared bathroom, so that’s something.”  
  
Before long, she’s laughing at his dumb jokes about the ceremony, and catching him up on her family gossip. And it almost feels like they never broke up. Caroline is leaning in close and she smells like the perfume he gave her from Christmas, the good one that maxed his credit card, not the one from the gas station he gave her their last Valentine’s together. Her hair is longer than it was when she left, and he wants to run his thumb across her cheek and tuck it behind her ear. She puts her hand on his arm, leaning back and laughing when he tells her about Schmidt’s imported hair gel.  
  
He hears Jess’ voice from the dance floor, and they both look up. She’s holding her hands in the air. “Come on in, honey.” She does a little twirl that lifts the hem of her dress up and flashes the goofy shorts off. “The water’s fine.”  
  
He knows she is trying to rescue him, but he doesn’t want to be rescued, dammit. He is finally making progress and can’t lose a step. “Jess, you know I don’t dance,” he calls back dismissively.  
  
“Oh, but you didn’t know I did this,” she challenges, and begins to pretend to drag herself across the dance floor with an imaginary rope. “I’m mime-walking. I’m Mime-cal Jackson.”  
  
He gives a polite laugh. Caroline shoves back from the table suddenly, and he eagerly follows her as she announces, “I’m gonna get a drink.”  
  
“Me too,” he agrees.  
Jess has all her concern in her eyes again. “Nick, wait, no.” She gestures to Caroline’s retreating form. He reassures her with wild, open-palmed gestures. “Jess, relax, this is good. I may actually have a chance, and it’s all because of you! So thank you!”  
  
He turns to go, leaving Jess to her weird dancing. “No, Nick. That wasn’t my intention. Nick…” she calls after him.  
  
After they grab their drink from the bar, Nick continuing to make her laugh by criticizing the bartender in a way only he can, under his breath, they make for the photo booth. Nick’s never been in one, since they didn’t take tokens, no matter how closely they were in size and weight to quarters. But he always wanted to be that couple that had cute photo strips with his girl from the mall on his fridge so he eagerly follows her into the small stall, his Whiskey Sour fresh on his tongue.  
  
She brushes her breasts against his hand as she leans over and presses the start button. “Ready?” she smiles, sitting on his lap.  
  
“Oh yeah,” he answers, and they go through a bunch of cheesy poses.  
  
“Can we stay in here all night?” she laughs. The flash goes off the last time, and catches him looking at her like she has his heart in her hand. Because, of course, she does. But she’s not looking at him, she’s staring right into the camera and smiling like she’s won something.  
  
“This is fun,” he says softly, and she’s looking back at him with that spark again.  
  
Then, the red curtain suddenly disappears, and Jess is back in a fake-furious bundle of emotion. “Ah-hah!” She proclaims, pointing. “I trusted you!”  
  
He smiles at her efforts, no matter how misplaced. They’ll laugh about this later, maybe tomorrow, when Caroline is back at the kitchen counter eating his Sunday morning pancakes-from-the-box. “Jess, get out of here.”  
  
“Nothing happened!” Caroline shrills, leaping off of him and out of the booth.  
  
Jess points again like a vengeful traffic cop. “After everything we built.”  
  
“Go away, Jess, please,” he says calmly. The flash keeps going off and blinding him.  
  
“Who are you?” His roommate sounds like she’s in a bad high school production of the musical _Chicago_. Which, incidentally, is not that popular in his actual home city of Chicago and rarely sells out.  
  
Caroline insists again, “No, really, nothing happened.” She draws her hand across her cleavage. “I have a boyfriend.”  
  
The flash goes off just as the realization hits his features. Capturing that Kodak moment forever on a little photo strip. He looks at her, reality rushing back like a freight train. “Wait. You have a boyfriend?”  
  
She has the decency to look apologetic. “Yeah, well, I’ve been seeing someone. I didn’t bring him because I didn’t wanna hurt your feelings, but now I know that you have Jess…”  
  
“Yeah, he has me,” she says in a low tone. “And our baby!” She frames her torso with her palms. This is evidently the threshold of Caroline’s weirdness factor, because she runs off with a quickly stuttered, “Okay, I’m just gonna let you guys…”  
  
“And our OTHER baby!” Jess yells after her, arms wide and eyes fierce.  
  
Schmidt comes up and is also yelling, and Nick just crawls back into the photo booth. He can’t believe he’d been so stupid as to fall right back into the Caroline trap again. What is it about her that he can’t just get over? He holds his head in his hands. It is so heavy.

He catches Jess’ voice going unnaturally high, and looks out as Schmidt calls her a “ruiner.”

And well, she’s properly angry now. She touches her collarbones in indignation and stalks toward Schmidt and the booth, hissing “Did you just call me a 'ruiner'?”

“Yeah,” Schmidt snaps back.  
  
“Okay, you know what? Forget it. I’m not helping you guys anymore.” They all shake their heads and she lunges forward into the booth, carelessly pulling open his jacket and hunting for her property. “Give me my teeth back.”  
  
“Stop it,” he growls. He tries to stop her with his own hand, but she’s too quick, and her fingers snag the edge of them. “You don’t appreciate them,” she snaps, as he tells her to cool it. Her voice goes extra low as she growls right back at him. “Give them back.” She already has them in her hand, and gives him a long look before ditching the three of them with a nasty little jibe. “I’m gonna have fun.” She shoves the teeth back in her mouth. “Cause there’s nothing wrong with who I am, and I like having fun at weddings. And I like dancing. And if you don’t like that, then tough tater tots, tooter. Jess is back.” She storms off with a flip of her long, dark hair. Nick watches her go with a new appreciation. Jess can be fierce. He saw that with the Spencer thing. And having that fire directed at him- well, it’s a little scary, and also a little hot. Dammit.

Nick draws the curtain shut on the booth again with a heaviness. Now he’s screwed up things with her, too. How much worse can this Saturday get?  
  
About six shots later, he’s stumbling around with his film strip and regrets when the videographer asks him for a send-off greeting. He ends up kicking over the cardboard versions of Bree and Steve after yelling at them that they’re cheap for not having an open bar. Cardboard Steve is so happy looking, with his pretty wife and his law degree and meaningful, respectable white collar life. It makes him want to punch things.

“Yeah, that just happened!” he yells happily, as the little paper people fall down. He stumbles off and finds his new house, the photo booth. There are no pretty blonde or brunette women for whom he has developed confusing feelings there, just some bridesmaids with dumb glasses.

“Oh hey, ladies, do you guys want to see a grown man cry?” he slurs. Surprisingly, they don’t, especially after he roars, “No? Then GET OUT!” They scurry off and he calls after, “I think I saw a single doctor looking at youuuuu.” He motions to the next lady in line. “This is gonna take a while, Orange.” She leaves him with his glass of booze in peace.  
  
He’s been so awful to Jess. All she wanted to do was help him. Also, he has a rare opportunity to take photos of his behind and have them printed without shame. Maybe they would make Jess laugh. He angles it so it’s in full view as the strobe continues to flash mercilessly. He can hear people murmuring outside, but so what? _Heh, more like butt so what?_ He’s sad and this is the only thing keeping him from being actually depressed, and plus he can’t face Jess after the way he’s treated her, so probably staying in the photo booth is the smartest thing to do, at least until the wedding is over. Jess, who was nice enough to pretend to be his girlfriend, which is a weird enough thing to ask someone, much less someone who you feel attracted to, which was really stupid on his part. Aside from the ten percent of his brain that thinks it was an awesome idea and also knows now that she’s the perfect height for kissing and her skin is like, super smooth. He really needs to apologize, but she isn’t nearby, so the logical thing to do is just start yelling her name, really. Because she will hear him and come help him, because she’s Jess, and just, like, the most awesome person he’s ever only known for one month.  
  
He hears the rest of the gang nearby and opens his eastern-facing wall-curtain. “Jess, the fact is that I was a mean person. And I’m sorry, okay?” The curtain rudely covers his face as he finishes his impassioned apology, kind of ruining his sincerity. Oops.  
  
Her lovely face is suddenly looking down at him.

“Hi, Nicholas,” she says softly. He secretly really likes it when she calls him Nicholas. She says it with a little lilt, like it’s her pet name for him that only she can use. Sure, Schmidtty uses it sometimes too, but usually only when he’s mad. Jess never uses it when she’s mad.

He welcomes her to his new home with a wave around, and she squeezes in next to him on the couch as he angles his body to give her room. They’re back to being super close again, which is bad because he knows he smells like the bar carpet at this point, like disappointment and stale liquor, and she’s Jess and her dress is still crisp and her eyes are just so huge and very, very, blue. She wants him to give up the booth and go dance with her. If he was a dumber man, he’d kiss her, because she’s so close and so good to him. But instead, he just follows her out of his house. It was too small anyway.  
  
He goes to the coffee station and gulps down two lukewarm cups black to sober him up. He has to face the blonde dragon and move on with his life. Like Jess said, they have to let each other go.

Caroline doesn’t want to hear it. She won’t even agree that it’s over, she just gives him a weird little hug and says “Goodbye.”  
  
He moves off and wipes the tears from his cheeks.

 

He hears a new song coming on and sees long legs and a short purple dress parked in a chair on the edge of the dancefloor. The DJ has those high school homecoming dance lights on, and they’re spinning little dots of light everywhere.  
  
He motions to her impatiently, speaking low.  
  
“Come on, Jess.”  
  
“What?” she asks, goofy thing that she is.

“Just please, just come with me right now.” He gestures out to the wooden floor again, and she gets up and walks beside him, just a little hesitantly. He pushes up his sleeves and looks around to see if anyone is about to witness this stupid behavior. Probably Caroline will. Oh well.  
  
He faces her, hands on his hips, and gives her a searching look, then a smile slowly creeps across his face as he raises his hands up and begins the duck quacking motion. Her face lights up and she laughs for real for the first time that day, mimicking him, and they do a slow mo, extra funky version of the Chicken Dance to the accompaniment of “Groovy Kind of Love”. Then Schmidt and Winston join them, and the rest of the night isn’t so bad.

Looking back, Nick knows that day, while horrible at the time, was the beginning of something else. And not just the extra movement he now does during the chicken dance, because really, the pecks do add something to the routine.


	2. Naked Cece Crashes Thanksgiving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episodes 4-6. Remember that this is all through Nick's eyes, so if he wasn't there to witness it, he doesn't know about it or "include it in his book."

**Chapter Two.**  
Naked Cece Crashes Thanksgiving.  


 

One weekend that Nick’s actually off, the owner hires a new bartender named Amanda. She’s leggy, with dirty blonde hair, and she’s as mysterious as she is pretty. Nick settles down on the couch with a beer, Winston, and Schmidt as they start up a chainsaw murder flick.

Jess wanders in, wearing toddler-appropriate pajamas and snacking on a bowl of ice cream. “Oh, scary movie. I hate scary movies, why are we watching this?” she murmurs.

“We’re not watching this, Jess,” Nick answers. He waves his hands to Schmidt and Winston. “We’re watching it.” She comes creeping over anyway, and Nick looks her up and down. He is probably one beer too far gone for this, he estimates. She drops like a sack of potatoes between him and Schmidt, brushing both of them as she makes herself a spot. “So fun, bein’ with the dudes, eating ice cream, watchin’ scary movies…” she takes another bite off her spoon. Nick motions to the screen and notices her pj’s are covered in little hearts. “We’re not scared, we’re dudes,” she says in a low voice. Winston shushes her.

Jess summarizes two kids’ movies and ruins their rental before they give up and leave her to it.

_

When Amanda jokingly suggests they go to dinner, Nick jumps at the opportunity. Despite liking the Steve Miller band (he thinks?) she is a pretty girl, and she seems nice, and she isn’t his roommate, so she’s ticked enough boxes from his casual encounter checklist. Schmidt is explaining all of his “date packages” which all include or consist of close up magic, when Jess walks in for her morning coffee before school. “You have a date? Fun! I want to talk to you guys about this stuff!”

 

“With Amanda,” Schmidt butts in.

“Schmidt!” Nick grouses. He didn’t want to talk about girls with Jess, for reasons he can’t explain off the top of his head which usually means he shouldn’t think about them for long at all.

 

“Amanda, from the bar? Woah! She’s a looker. Hacha-matcha!” She fans herself with her collar. Nick looks at her, partway amused and partly embarrassed. “Yeah, I know how hot she is, Jess,” he says irritably.  
  
“Have you been out with anyone since Caroline?” she asks, her mug firmly gripped in her little hands. He grimaces. “No.”

“Woah, big deal alert! Scary stuff, kids. Yeesh. Falling rocks, bridge out. Duck!”

This is why I don’t talk to you, Jess, Nick both thinks and says. It’s too weird with her. There’s always some undercurrent of comparison and disapproval, since he met Jess.

“You’re gonna be fine, just suck in the gut,” Schmidt advises.

Nick’s stomach clenches against his will. “What gut?”

Jess points like it’s a cloud in the sky. “The little pooch where you keep your extra cookies,” she explains, not unkindly.

Nick shrinks back in horror, making a face at them both as he flees for his room.--

\--

He decides this is nothing a little pep dance can’t help.

Jamaican music makes him feel sexy. (It’s something about the beat and the drums.) He cranks his CD player and strips in front of his full-length mirror, dancing and trying to picture what Amanda will see when she sees him bare. When he drops his briefs, he looks down at his semi-soft dick.

“It is what it is,” he shrugs. He starts to work on his moves, stretching and pretending to hold his headphones in one ear, thinking about Amanda. That helps the erection situation.

He turns in dismay when he hears his doorknob turning, and is faced with… Jess, in her cute little teacher dress, staring at his junk with a grin on her face.

“What-whata-” Nick yelps.  
  
Jess scream-giggles and takes off, slamming his door behind her.

“OH MY GOD,” he yells, covering himself and sinking down onto the mattress.

He’s going to have to move out. He can never look her in the eyes again. _She_ _looked at his dick_ , his fully erect dick, and screamed, and giggled, somehow simultaneously. And then _ran_.

He puts on briefs, then boxers, then an undershirt, and a t-shirt over that, and his thickest Mexican grocery store jeans, and his red hoodie, then covers his face because he can hear her talking in the living room. He has to get out, and go anywhere, occupy a space where she’s not. He still has two hours before he’s supposed to meet Amanda, but he’ll drive around or chase pigeons or something. Anything to get away from Jess.

\--  


So naturally, she’s waiting to ambush him as he heads out the door.

“Oh Nick, hey!” she says, too brightly. “Hey,” he mumbles back, head to the floor, trying to get past her before she blocks his way. He isn’t successful. Short of pushing her over, he has to deal with her. He grabs his car keys from the bowl.  
  
“So, that was weird, right?” Jess says.  
  
“I’m running out the door, Jess,” he replies, reaching for the door knob. She blocks him off again. “I think we should talk about it.”  


He looks up at her. “Talk about what?” he says desperately.  
  
“About me seeing...your… peen.” He grimaces. “The peen, wha’ I saw,” she uses that bizarre English cockney accent she uses when she’s being extra weird. She puts her finger over her top lip and goes French. “Bonjour, le peen…” 

“You’re blocking the door,” he snaps.  
  
“...Okay,” Jess answers. She looks at him seriously. “Cool, go have fun on your date.”

She cups her hand around her mouth and wags one finger down toward the floor. “Tell that guy to behave.” She kneels down, addressing his crotch directly. “The adventure begins!”  
  
“Okay. Excuse me, Jess,” he intones, opening the door and slipping past her, then slamming it behind him.

\--

He ends up sitting at a laundromat, pretending he’s washing clothes, reading one of the free classified papers. Every few minutes he gets up, scowls at one of the washers, then sits back down. He stops when the clothing’s actual owner gives him a look. His eyes skim the ads, but he isn’t reading them. Instead, he keeps hearing Jess’ little shriek in his head. Did she like what she saw? Why would he even care? Did she think his dick was something to laugh at? Was it smaller than Spencers? Why would that matter? The simple fact is that Jess never should've seen his dick in the first place, so he should never be sitting here comparing his junk to some beautiful-haired wizards'. No woman has ever really said anything about his penis, but it has gotten the job done as far as the bedroom was concerned, so he never really thought about it. But certainly, no woman had ever screamed or laughed at his erection before.

The whole thing was very disconcerting.

He was hoping he’d clear his thoughts by the time he met up with Amanda, but instead, the whole moment kept running through his head like a horrible sitcom re-run. Her face, her smile, the noise- all of it. Her attitude afterward seemed to be complimentary, but what if she had just felt bad for her initial reaction? What if Amanda did the same thing to his penis?

She invites him back to her place, and his heart is racing the whole way there. She’s so hot, and so into him, with her little black dress and her strange ironic jokes, and he’s just hoping to focus on her and finally move on from Caroline. He lets Jess’ moment replay one last time in his head as Amanda grabs his head and pulls him in for a kiss. Then he wills himself to lock the whole thing away to deal with later. He puts his hands on her waist.

She pulls back. “You’re a good kisser,” she does her irony-laugh. He gulps. “Can we be serious, right now? Do you mind being seriou-”

“I’m gonna get serious, on your face!” she leans in to bite at him, then slides down his body toward his belt.

“I have no idea what that means,” he confesses, holding his hands out. She giggles again, and grabs his buckle. “Actually, could you not laugh while you’re near my penis?” he asks seriously.

She sobers for a second, then reaches for his shoulders. “Take it off.” She pulls at his shirt. He wrestles her away as she snatches kisses at his neck. This woman seriously wants him and it just feels… wrong.

He pulls her into an awkward bear hug. Undeterred, she tries to pry off his shirt from the back. “Here- do you want me to go first?” she pulls off her tank top, and her breasts are round, firm, and sit like two oranges waiting to be squeezed, tipped with seashell-pink nips. No bra.

“Oh my God, look at you,” he says, dejectedly. He’s not going to be able to boink her brains out, and she’s so willing, and so beautiful.

“Take off your clothes now,” she says, like he’s a particularly stupid kitten who can’t find the treat she just put on his nose. He pretends to take off his shirt, but really he leaves it on.

The night doesn’t get any better from there.

Friggin’ Jess. If he didn’t know the conversation that was waiting for him, he would have just gone home. Instead, he spends a very uncomfortable eight hours “cuddling” Amanda on her narrow double bed before telling her he has a big Saturday planned and hastening to her sidewalk. He throws another parking ticket on the ground before pulling off the curb and heading back to the loft.

\---

She’s at the table when he comes in and tosses his keys in the bowl.

“Hi, Nick.” She raises a strawberry to her lips, dressed in a pretty white blouse and a full black and white skirt. “So I guess your date went well. Sleepover party!” she sings. He snags a mug from the cabinet and pours himself coffee. He looks back at her, then back to his drink.

“I have something from school that...um, made me think of you.” Jess reaches into her huge purse, rummaging until she pulls out a brightly colored twig decorated with beads and feathers.  
  
“It’s a feelings stick.” She brandishes it. “Whoever is holding the feelings stick has permission to say whatever he or she is feeling without being judged.” Nick watches her with narrowed eyes and a major turtle face. “I’ll go first,” she continues. “Um, I feel like I wanna know what you’re feeling,” she says earnestly. He crosses the kitchen, puts his mug on the kitchen table, and reaches across, taking the twig.  
  
He snaps it in half right before her wide blue eyes. He tosses the two broken pieces down and leans forward, getting in her face, challenging her. She looks down at the bits, then reaches for her bag again. “Believe it or not, that’s not the first time someone’s broken my feelings stick,” she confides. She pulls out a smaller one, with even more feathers. “I also have a travel size.”

“No,” he says softly. He takes off for the elevator.

“Nick, wait!” He’s smashing the down button when she comes out of the front door. “Nick, we have to talk about this!” The doors slide open finally, and he runs into the elevator. She follows him in just as they begin to close. “What are you doing?” he demands.  
  
“I’m sorry I saw your doojer and your chickadees,” she says desperately. “And I didn’t mean to laugh, I just-”  
  
“Then why did you laugh?” he asks honestly. “Is there something...funny about it?” He chooses to ignore the fact that she also noticed his balls.

“No!” she says emphatically. “Beautiful. Stately. A real treat.”

“Oh my God,” he says again, for the third time in twelve hours, and without any sexual context whatsoever. The doors ding open and one of their neighbors gets on.

“I think it’s great that you dance naked to Jamaican music!” she stage whispers. Nick looks over at their fellow passenger and the guy gives them both a glance and a frown. “That’s really cool, you should explore your sexuality!” The other guy swiftly exits, and Nick reaches out, grasping her upper arms and gently moving her out of his way. “Excuse me,” he whispers. He heads for the stairs.  
  
“Come on, Nick, I dance naked all the time!” she cries as he strides away. She chases after him, and he runs back to the elevator and jumps in just as the doors close.  He presses the 4th floor button, then groans as the door opens immediately. Jess, having run up the flight of stairs, stands gasping outside the elevator. “Nick, please talk to me.” She gets in the car as he stands, moving his hands to his hips. “Jess, there’s nothing to talk about.” She sighs. “You ruined my date!” He spreads his hands out, gesturing. She drops her face down, and he leans closer. “Every time I tried to take my clothes off, Jess, I heard your little, “haHA!”, your little crazy giggle scream.” She tilts her head, eyes open and huge. “And all I want to do is have meaningless sex with a beautiful woman, who, yes, talks in mind-bending riddles. But I can’t.” He leans closer. “Because I can’t get your little haHA out of my head!” he roars. She looks stricken as the doors ding open and he stalks out back toward the apartment.  


“Well maybe you don’t want to have meaningless sex, maybe that’s not your style!” she cries after him. Projecting, much?  
  
He turns. “I have a bing bong and chickadees, it is my style!” He goes for the door handle. She runs in after him. “Stop following me!” he yells.  
  
“Then stop running away from me,” she says, seriously. He turns to face her. “I just want to have a mature conversation.”  
  
“How can we have a mature conversation when you can’t even say the word penis?” he demands.

“I can say the word peen-” she insists.

“Say it!” he calls.  
  
“I-” she smiles self-consciously, nodding.  “Nee-nas.” 

“What?”  
  
“Pyrnas.”

“You said pyrnas.” He sighs.   
  
“Peeenis,” she belts out melodically. “Not singing,” he counters. 

“Pennnnus.” Her tone is low and drawn out. “Not like a ghoul.”  
  
She giggles and he smiles back, for the briefest of seconds. She stomps her foot. “I can say it!” she shouts. “Penist.” 

“You said penist.” He has his hands on his hips again.  
  
“Eeis-pay!” she shouts. “Not in pig latin!” Nick responds.  
  
“Pyrnis,” she says confidently. “Okay, not in Swedish,” he says, looking a little impressed. 

“Pyrmom.” “Not in fake Italian!”  
  
She makes a screeching noise. Before he can respond, Winston, who has been parked on the couch with his headphones on this entire time, yells “SHUT UP!”

Nick ignores him. “Say it with me,” he encourages. 

“Pe-nyrs,” she says, along with him, mispronouncing the last syllable with a pained look on her face.

“Yeah, I’m the one who’s immature,” he snaps, turning and heading into the bathroom, scrubbing his hand through his hair. As Nick goes to use the urinal, Schmidt comes creeping down from the top edge of the stall like a spider, trying to get a look at his junk.

\--

Thankfully, Amanda decides to forgive his strange behavior from the previous night, after he explains during their shift at the bar.

“Honesty? I like that,” she says.

They decide to give it another go- at his place, this time. Maybe on familiar territory, he won’t feel so insecure.

So naturally, Jess has to completely and utterly ruin it.

\--

Amanda starts getting handsy while they’re still at work. She squeezes his leg the whole ride back to the loft, running her fingers up and down the inseam of his jeans. By the time they’re in the elevator ride up, she pushes him up against the wall and kisses him senseless. They slam the loft’s front door open, and he’s glad that all of his roommates are out, because they are making a racket. Amanda’s physically hanging off of him as he twists his doorknob open and walks in, carrying her and running his hands all over her lean torso and back. She gasps and moans as he kisses her neck, arching her back.  
  
“Oh you’re so hot. I can’t believe you’re into me,” Nick groans as she falls back onto his bed. He whips his shirt off as she does the same. “All right, wow,” he says. This time she’s wearing a black bra with a bunch of straps. “Oh wow, this is happening…” Nick has barely enough time to contemplate, while Amanda urges him on, yanking for his belt and repeating, “Take off your pants, take off your pants!” 

“Okay, okay,” he answers, leaning back and making a face. “Take ‘em off,” she encourages. They do a weird little dance-chant back and forth, and his jeans and belt drop to the carpet. “Lights on, lights off? Oh, I’m totally cool with this,” he says nervously, reaching for the waistband of his briefs. The giggle scream is just waiting at the edge of his thoughts.

He drops trou and as he pulls them down, a movement catches his attention. He whips his head to the left- and has a face full of Jess.

Jess, who is on his floor, low-crawling around the foot of the bed, wrapped in a towel. She’s now gazing up at the underside of his throbbing manhood, and if she hadn’t gotten a good look at his “bubbles” before, well, she’s got an ideal angle now. 

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he hollers. Jess gasps and leaps up, Amanda starts screaming “Who is that?!”, then Jess is shrieking animalistically, like a fox caught in a bear trap. She turns and flies toward the door, but smacks straight into his bookcase and turns, dropping her towel.  
  
Jess is completely naked, by the way.

Nick’s gaze wanders, dumbstruck, up and down her body. His eyes appreciate every inch. She looks up into his face, and he can’t read her expression. She turns to Amanda, and doesn’t try to cover herself. “Hi, I’m Jess. Welcome to our home.” She runs back out, across the hallway, giving them a good shot of her (most decidedly rounded, possibly perfect, pert little) ass.

Nick glances over at the traumatized Amanda, then sinks his face into his palms.

After a moment, she grabs at her tank top.  
  
“Who was that? Do you have a girlfriend, Nick?” she demands, pulling the shirt back over her head.  
  
“No, she’s my roommate. It’s a long story.”  
  
“Uh- I’m sure it is. I’m gonna get going, Nick. See you around.” She turns for the door.  
  
“Amanda, wait- I drove you here-”  
  
“I’ll call a cab.” She’s already out the door.

Nick sinks into his bed, waits five minutes, then dresses. He hears the entryway door slam behind Amanda.

\---

His three roommates are all on the couch as he lectures them sternly, the way his father probably should have when Nick was a kid.

Jess is curled into herself, her parrot pajamas covering all the glorious skin he’d so recently witnessed. Strangely enough, he doesn’t feel insecure anymore about being naked. She’d shrieked at seeing him naked, and he couldn’t account for his own reaction. They’re even, as far as he’s concerned. But he’s still going to yell.  
  
“We live in a world with rules!” he shouts. “We knock. We have doors!” She shrinks as he gets closer. “And we knock on those doors.”  
  
“I’m sorry, Nick,” she says softly.  
  
“Just knock!” She picks up the feelings stick. “Nick, I fee-” 

“Put that down,” he states firmly. 

“But we have to talk-”  
  
“Nothing to talk about.” He stares her down. 

Winston picks up the feelings stick. “I feel that Nick is not honoring the feelings stick.” Schmidt takes it. “I feel it too.” Winston’s fingers wrap around it. “I feel that Schmidt has had a particularly bad day, and I feel if Nick is truly Schmidt’s friend, he would show him what’s in his pants.” Schmidt nods. “I feel supported.”  
  
“What is going on with you two?” Nick demands. “What are you doing?”  
  
“I feel Nick is yelling.” Winston holds up the feelings stick.

Nick stalks out of the room, closing with “Stop it!”  
  
\---

He’s on his bed with his laptop when he hears her knock. She comes in with her eyes shielded.  
  
“Jess, you don’t have to knock once you’re in the room.” All of his anger has burned out, and now he’s starting to feel kinda bad about the yelling.

She comes in with a dorky smile. “I worked on something for you.” He rises up and lifts his eyebrows. “All right.” He spreads his hands out.

“Penis,” she says seriously. Then she grins at him, and he smiles back. He nods. “Very good.”  
  
She beams back. “Thank you.” His eyes sweep back down her body. She’s standing in almost the same spot.

“Um, so did Amanda call you back?” she asks.  
  
“No, I don’t see Amanda calling me back.” He’s still smiling. 

Jess apologizes again.  
  
“It’s okay, maybe you were right.” He sighs. “Maybe I’m not ready for meaningless sex with beautiful women.”  
  
She blinks and licks her lips. “Well maybe when you are, you’ll be able to show her your other penis. Your heart penis.”  
  
“Get out of my room.” He points to the door. She turns.  
  
“Hey, um… hahaha…” she tries to play it off. “When I was, um, leaving in a hurry, did you see…” she gestures up and down her body, “everything?”  
  
“Yup,” he says, with a tiny, smug smile.  
  
“Even my…” she looks away, considering. “...gumbo pot?” 

He makes a disgusted face, sticking out his tongue. “Gumbo pot? Get out!” She’s already gone, but she was smiling as she left. And so was Nick.  
  
                                                                ---  


When Nick sees Jess creep out the door in a pajama outfit with a hoodie thrown over it, he’s mildly concerned, but says nothing. Besides, it’s Friday night, and he has a video game calling his name, after three back to back shifts at the bar.

And later he’s going to look up some porn that may or may not involve brunettes with absurdly large blue eyeballs.

Schmidt and Winston get in some dumb fight about leisurewear, which Nick ignores to the best of his ability. He only really starts to pay attention when Jess and her hot model friend come traipsing in just after midnight. He shakes his head when Winston, coated in paper towels, and Schmidt, wearing only his tiny kimono, stare blankly at their female roommate and her friend, who is wearing a tight black pleather dress that leaves nothing whatsoever to the imagination.

Jess apologizes in advance for anything Cece might do while drunk while Nick tries very hard to ignore all of them.

Unfortunately, Schmidt hears Cece complain that she still wants to dance, so he cranks an LMFAO song on his fancy Bose speakers, and the model starts wriggling around like a worm on a hook right in front of the TV. Nick finally gives up, grabs a beer, and watches the chaos unfold before him.

“This is the opposite of being alone,” he says. “This is the opposite of what I wanted.” The other two guys flirt back and forth with Cece. He gestures with his beer.

Jess comes out carrying one of the pillows off her bed and a couple of afghans. “Wow, how’d this happen?” she asks sarcastically, rebuffing Schmidt when he air-grinds at her. “I’m not a part of this,” she warns.

Jess speaks to her best friend like she’s a toddler, and Cece points at Nick. “You get up!” she calls playfully. He tries to refuse her, but she high-heels it over and pulls him up off the couch. Then she reaches over suddenly and rips at his plaid button up. He tries to redirect her to Schmidt as his buttons come flying off. “What the heck?” he yelps. “Yeah, that just happened… it’s really not great under here, you have to love hair,” he assures her, then clutches his shirt closed. “I think it’s time for bed.” He gathers up his newspaper as Schmidt sheep-dogs Cece into his room, then closes the door after her, and runs around doing triumphant parkour around the living room. “Well, at least this tires him out, right?” he asks Winston.

The next morning, Nick wakes up to the smell of food and wanders out to the sight of Jess cooking breakfast in tiny polka dot shorts, her hair up in a long ponytail. “Do you want some eggs?” she offers.

“No, I’ve got my own breakfast.” He motions down to his plate of food. “I don’t need you to..”

“What?” she asks defensively.  
  
“I dunno, take care of me.” She looks at him incredulously. “Just stop bein’ so nice.” She snakes her neck in response. “Your mother’s being so nice,” she shoots back.  
  
He scrunches his face. “Slam on my mother,” he intones back, darkly humorous. They share a little laugh. “Your mother’s gonna slam on your mother,” she taunts, waving around her spatula. Really, maybe Jess should have been there for the inappropriate loungewear conversation, because those shorts are kind of fantastic for a few perverted reasons.

\--

When Nick’s ready to shower, he finds the bathroom already well over occupancy levels.

“Does the water get any hotter than this?” Cece asks, and he (as well as the other guys) are very aware of the fact that only the silver IKEA shower curtain is separating her lovely body from their view. They all stammer like sixth-grade boys around their first real crush.

When Cece comes out of the shower wrapped in a kitchen towel, only Schmidt has the presence of mind to compliment her. Nick’s too busy staring her down to notice she’s approaching until Jess tries to frog-march her past him. He throws his hands up but keeps blocking her path mistakenly. Jess lingers behind as Cece heads eagerly toward her breakfast. “Disappointed in all of you,” she says sternly. She wags her finger in Nick’s face. “Especially you.” She stares him down, inches from his face. “It was a bad moment.” She drops to a whisper. “I thought you were better than that.” He looks after her. “I know, I am, sometimes!” Nick offers, staring where her face was as she strides away.

He needs some toiletry stuff for his shower, after all, so he drops by Jess’ room to see if she wants to tag along. They do this kinda thing every couple of weeks.

Cece is acting super weird as he leans in Jess’ doorway. “Then you can get that thing you really need,” she says, and Jess gives her a bizarre look, darting her eyes between him and Cece. He figures it must be related to their special time of the month. “Oh, I wonder what that is,” he says mildly.

“She’ll be right out,” Cece reassures, and he heads back to his room to finish dressing. He finds some jeans that are only a couple days dirty.

“Are you ready? Come on!” he calls from his room across the hall. “Be there in a sec, bro,” she answers back faintly. “...Did you just call me ‘bro?’” he responds.

The ride to the market is a bit weird. There’s something in the air he can’t identify. He’s felt it before, when she drinks the pink wine he mostly keeps in stock for her at the bar, or sometimes when they sit a little too close together. Jess is a sorta jumpy and nervous. Her tension crackles over and spills into him. She’s also distracted; he has to repeat himself when asking about how long Cece’s gonna stay. She stares down at his boots and gasps, “Oh my God.” “What?” he asks, as she circles him warily, parroting back his query. They’re doing some weird shimmy thing around the drugstore aisle and it gets progressively more uncomfortable, finally breaking at the point where he wraps his hand around her shoulder to bring her eyes up into his. She denies using toilet paper. He calls back to her mother joke and she stares up at him. The look she has in her eyes is like she’s just seeing him for the first time.

They pay and head back to the car with the same disconcerting mood between them. She won’t look at him again, and no matter how many corny jokes he cracks, she doesn’t smile.

“What’s going on with you, Jess?” he asks, concerned. She seems genuinely pissed at him and he doesn’t understand why. “Why do you have to say my name like that? _Jeh-ess_? And why do you have to wear old man clothes all the time?” She buries her face in her hands. Nick looks down at his perfectly age-appropriate shirt, that Schmidt had given him only like, ten years ago, and called a Henry or something. “I don’t wear old man clothes,” he shoots back. “You don’t like the way I dress?”  
  
She fans herself. “No, I just…” 

“Did I do something to you?” he demands. Did she see his browser history? Oh god, had she?  
  
A Latina lady bends down on her side of the car. “A rose for the lady?” she asks. Nick pulls out his wallet automatically. “Okay, I’ll buy you one! Or two, they come as two? I’ll buy two.” “No!” Jess cries as the woman smiles, takes the cash, and hands the roses to him. He offers them to Jess. “Here, take the roses, it’s two dollars, it’s not a big deal,” he grins goofily, as she swats them away like they’re full of bees. “They’re nice roses,” he muses, then hears the car door unlock. “Hey, what are you doing?” he demands, as she bolts from the car, bags in hand.

“Where are you going? Jess, it was a joke!” he calls after her. “What are you doing? Get back in the car!” She lizard-runs away, bags held high, ignoring him. She’s also running the wrong away, the opposite way from home.

He growls and puts on his turn signal, changing lanes to follow her path. He racks his brain for what he could have done to scare or hurt her this badly, and comes up empty. As he crawls through traffic, he is reminded of just how bad their neighborhood is. Dirty looking homeless dudes come up to his windshield at every stoplight, then keep moving when he waves them off. When one of them is, on closer examination, a woman, he gives her the roses he’d bought for Jess. Was she allergic? And where was she, anyway? He’s texted her twice and called three times, but she won’t pick up.  
  
“Have you seen a pretty girl with brown hair, green shirt, running this way?” he asks, as he hands the woman the roses.  
  
“My ex-wife,” she sneers, and throws the roses on the ground. “Do you have any cash?”  
  
“No,” Nick answers honestly. The hobo-lady spits on the ground and moves on to the next car.

He asks after Jess with passersby, even hazarding a guess that she was actually allergic to roses, and maybe passed out somewhere. He gets assurance that she’d finally gotten turned in the right direction when one bearded guy says the crazy broad with green bags and a green shirt and big bug eyes had come scuttling by not twenty minutes earlier. He parks under the bridge two blocks over, throws cardboard over his car, and looks around, calling her name. He finally trudges back into the building and rides the elevator up, terribly worried.

Seeing her, panting and strained, in their living room lights a new rage in him. “Seriously, Jess, what the hell happened?” he demands, throwing his hands on his hips. Jess turns away from Cece to face him. “I’ve been driving around for the last hour lookin’ for ya!” She hunches over and fixes him with a scrunched up face. 

“We were hoping to get everything out on the table,” Cece says, while Jess ducks down and adds, “The table that’s not a table. The table that doesn’t exist, don’t worry about it.”

“We were in the middle of traffic!” he yells, leaning in toward her. “And you just got out and ran away!” She looks up and away from him. “I was hot,” she excuses.  


“You were so hot that you had to jump out of my car and run?!” Jess looks at him sheepishly, holding her upper arm, and nods. “Why are you standing like that?” he asks. She’s hunched over like an old woman.

“This is how I stand!” she insists.  
  
“I’ve never seen you stand like that,” he snaps. “I was really worried something had happened to you,” he repeats, emphasizing with his hands. “Okay? And you can’t just walk around this neighborhood with bags full of toilet paper... _that you don’t even use!_ ” He stalks off to his room, shutting the door behind him. He lurks there for the rest of the day and into the evening, all the way until it’s time for him to brush his teeth and head to bed.

She’s in the bathroom when he walks in, and he smiles before she sees him, her blue and black polka dot pajama outfit baggy over her slim frame. Their eyes meet, and he reaches for his toothbrush. She makes a little grunt to get his attention, busy scrubbing at her teeth already. He holds out his toothbrush and she squeezes on a stripe of paste to the bristles. The day she’d moved in, they discovered they liked the same brand of toothpaste and she’d sung a little song about it, of course. He shoves the brush in his mouth, and they smile at each other. 

“Hey,” she says, mouth full of bubbles. They share a little laugh. “I’m sorry I acted so weird today.” She motions with her hands. “Weird!” 

“It’s okay,” he allows, talking around the soap on his tongue. They turn back to their sinks with sly smiles, and all is forgiven and forgotten.

                                                               ---

Brosgiving has always been a loft thing. They save their days off for Christmas break, and hang around eating pizza or whatever other junk, watch football, then head to Best Buy for Black Friday. It’s been the running tradition for at least four years.  
  
Naturally, the idea horrified Jess, who loves to celebrate all the holidays, even the stupid ones only teachers knew about, like International Hug a Panda Day. An actual, real holiday is straight up her alley.  
  
The night before Thanksgiving, she comes staggering in with a huge bundle in her arms. She drops it as she closes the door. Nick notices what it is and shakes his head, covering his face.  
  
“Well, I went to five grocery stores, and I got the last turkey in America!” she says brightly. Nick turns and regards her, beer in hand. “No. Jess, we’re not doing Thanksgiving! Okay? We talked about this. We’re just gonna watch football, drink beer, and then we’re going to Best Buy for Black Friday.” “Or as I call it… Friday,” Winston quips.  
  
“It’s our thing, Jess. It’s Dudesgiving,” Schmidt declares.  
  
“Okay, no matter how many emails you send, that’s not a thing!” Besides, Brosgiving sounds way better. Nick temporarily redirects his attention to Schmidt, which gives Jess enough time to smuggle the turkey into the kitchen.  
  
“Look, it’s not a big deal. I’m just cooking dinner for you guys… and Paul,” she says quietly. 

“Did you say ‘And Paul”? Who’s Paul?” Nick demands. She smiles brightly and he can’t help but reflect it back at her, briefly. “Did you invite someone named Paul to our house?”  
  
“Yes, I did!” she says triumphantly. “I asked someone out!”  
  
“You asked someone out,” Nick replies, lowering his voice and his beer a little. This wasn’t something he was ready for. Especially since all his feelings about her were all swirly and confused and unapproachable at the moment.  
  
“Be honest, is the turkey named Paul?” Schmidt teases.  


“It’s a real guy. And he teaches at my school, and he’s really, really...hot!” she sings the last word.  
  
Great.  
  
She’s inviting some hot teacher over to the loft and now Nick will have to be nice to the guy, and ignore all the pesky little voices in his head that make him smile back instantly when she smiles at him. A turtle face settles itself onto his features.  


“And the turkey is named Hank! Hanksgiving.” She laughs at her pun. “And we are going to eat him.” She almost drops the thing as Nick mutters, “Hanksgiving.”  


\---  
  
He can only scrunch his face when she thinks her plan to replace Paul’s dead nana is actually a good one.

“He’s gonna be our fifth roommate, I’m telling ya,” Winston says seriously as she disappears.  
  
“It’s a first date,” Nick says dismissively.  
  
Jess ropes Schmidt into cooking for them all by getting Cece to come. She learned too early what his weakness was and is exploiting it, because Jess is as smart as she is pretty. 

Nick wonders vaguely if she’s figured out his weakness. That she might be…

Better to not finish that thought.

\---

The next morning, Jess is wearing her Jam Day shirt as she tries to put the thermometer into the turkey. It snaps off at the base and the stabbing bit flies off and rolls under the table.  
  
“Hey look, it’s ready,” Nick gestures sarcastically. 

“What am I gonna do?! He comes in three hours!” she cries.  
  
As Jess considers cuddling naked with the frozen poultry, Schmidt admits it is turning him on a little. “It is?” Nick says incredulously. His best friend’s perversity knows no bounds. Thank God he hadn’t seen all Jess was working with; it would be ten times worse.  
  
Cece sashays in just at that moment. “Cece!” Jess calls from the floor. “Thank God. Come down and lie on the turkey with me.”  
  
“Oh hell yeah, do that.” “Yeah, that would be good.” The other two loft mates offer as Nick considers. Maybe? Cece ignores them all, naturally. “This is a terrible idea.” She gestures to Hank, cradled in Jess’ arms. “Oh yeah, 100%,” she agrees.  


\---

  
They throw it in the dryer.  
“I put it on permanent press,” Jess says helpfully.  
“Good, so you don’t have to iron it.” Nick gazes at the spinning, still-raw meat with as much disgust as the rest of them.” There’s a knock at the door.  
  
“Oh no, he’s here early! How do I look?” It probably is better that she doesn’t know. She runs over, fixes her shirt, fluffs her ponytail, and answers the door. A very average-looking guy steps in, holding a violin case in one hand, dressed in a suit.  
  
“Welcome to our home,” Jess says graciously. Nick gives him a good once-over. Jess’ idea of a hot guy never fails to surprise him.  
  
Jess bursts into song about eating turkey. To his horror, Paul adds another verse in his own sing-song voice.  
  
“Oh my God, there’s two of them," Nick observes with interest.  
  
\---

“Hey Nick, can I talk to you?” Jess calls as she heads to freshen up. She herds him into her room and slams the door.  
  
“I just need you to not do that thing that you do!” she cries, rounding on him. She brandishes her curling iron at him. “What thing? I don’t do a thing!” he demands.  
  
“Yes! You get all mean and you make that little turtle face.” She demonstrates.  
  
“Okay, I don’t think I make a turtle face.” Nick grouses, vaguely aware that a somewhat reptilian face has arranged itself on his features.  
  
“Just talk to him like a normal human being,” she snaps. She gestures wildly. “And not about politics, or small business loans, or Google conspiracy thing, okay? I’ve only seen him at school, and I really wanna wow him tonight, okay?” She reaches up and fixes her bra strap through her shirt. Her tone becomes pleading. “Please, he’s the only guy I’ve liked since Spencer.”  
  
Nick blinks. That almost sorta...hurt? He shies away from the feeling, opens his mouth, closes it again. 

“I’m not good at this stuff, so... “ she whispers, shoulders sagging. “Please, just help me.”  
  
His eyes search her face, then slant away. He shrugs. “All right, fine, I’ll help you,” he answers softly. She cheers up immediately.  
  
“Shake on ‘dat, par-ner?” she asks in a terrible Wild West accent, curving out her palm toward him.  
  
“I don’t want to, not like that, no,” Nick answers, looking at her again, his mug in his hand.  
  
She nods. “Fair enough.”

\---

Paul is on the couch with Winston when Nick emerges from Jess’ room. He calls him Nicholas, which is definitely something that maybe five people on the planet get to call him, and Paul is not one of those people. Nick’s trying, but goddamn.  
  
“Kicking back a couple pumpkin ales,” Paul says, taking a swig off his. “I think that’s a lager,” Nick replies. Being, as, you know… he’s a bartender. And probably knows the contents of his own refrigerator pretty well.  


Nick fake-smiles through the awkward protests. Paul doesn’t even know where the Lions play.  
This is going to be a long, long evening.

Jess comes out in a red dress that covers everything, and she and Paul laugh over another terrible pun as Nick wishes he had one of the stupid pumpkin lagers to act as some of that precious social lubricant. He takes another pull off his tea.

That ends up being a mistake, because somehow Jess ends up forcing him to drive Paul to the store for more walnuts.

Paul is a male version of Jess. Nick has never been more secure in his sexuality than on this day, because while he is wildly attracted to the female version, he finds Paul just flat-out annoying. Maybe it’s because he knows that deep down, this is the kind of put-together, silly, quirky guy that Jess seems to like- and Nick and Paul couldn’t be less alike if they tried. Which means the odds of Jess ever returning his misplaced affections for her seem very slim indeed.  
  
Freaking Jessica Day. Freaking Thanksgiving. Freaking Paul.  
  
\---

He manages to get Paul and the nuts back to the nuthouse they will apparently be sharing together soon, if Winston is right. And he doesn’t crash his car intentionally, which is really saving something, considering how much he dislikes both Paul and his crappy car.

Naturally, the dryer explodes just as Jess’ date is tattling about Nick’s behavior to her. Friggin’ teacher.  
  
Nick, Winston, and Schmidt use throw pillows to try to clear out the smoke. 

“It’s like a Prince video!” Schmidt exclaims, still shirtless for some reason which probably involves Cece’s presence.

“Remember when it was only dudes living here, and we had no fires?” Winston asks. Then coughs.

“This is ridiculous! Three months ago, we didn’t even know this girl!” Nick is the most irrationally angry of all of them. Then again, that’s pretty much the way he is normally, even without fires.

“We’re going to the bar, we can’t get rid of the smoke,” he announces, leading the way out.

\------

Naturally, what Nick wants doesn’t happen. Instead, they go next door, to Miss Beverly’s place, which Jess sweetly informs them isn’t breaking and entering (which is a felony-law school!) because she has a key. And the neighbor has a key to their place, which is really interesting considering Nick doesn’t even have a key to his own (shared) apartment.

She lets everyone else in, then jumps in Nick’s face and slams the door before he can bring up the rear.

“No, not you,”  she stops him, glaring lowly.  
  
He stares at her, up and down from her flats to the giant bow on her head that makes her look like Minnie Mouse.  


“What are you doing? You told me you’d be nice to him!” she yells.  


“I was nice to him! I’ve been very nice to Paul,” he counters. “The whole car ride over I was nice to him. You know what he tells me about?” He has one of the damn pumpkin lagers in his hand. “He likes Air Bud 2. He loves dogs. I know where he gets his copies made.” Her eyes get bigger and wider as she gets angrier and angrier. Nick kinda likes it, especially since he’s buzzed. “He likes to whistle. He wanted to open the door with me, so when my hand went up, so did his,” he hisses.  
  
She narrows her eyes and leans in toward him. “Oh, I get it! He’s not cool enough for you! Cause no one can be cool enough for cool Nick Miller!” She frowns in a chelonian way. “I’m Nick Miller, I’m so cool and I make my cool face.” He stares at a spot above her short little head. He is making the damn face and he knows it. But at least she thinks he’s cool?  
  
She stamps her foot and throws her fist thru the air. “Why don’t you like him?!” she shrieks.  
  
“Who cares? Do you like him?” Nick shoots back. “Of course I like him!” she yells.  
  
“Then fine! Then it doesn’t it matter what I think, does it? Cause I don’t have to have sex with him!” He gestures toward the door with his beer. Because he definitely hasn’t been imagining Jess’ breathy pink-wine-induced giggle while Paul sings some stupid song to her in bed or anything. And they won’t get married and have six pretty, musical babies anytime soon who will all go to the school they both teach it, with their perfect little teacher careers.

 

“I do!” she agrees. “I want to!” Her eyes are huge again; Nick closes his face down and turns away, grimacing. “I want to have sex with him big time! You heard me! Big time, okay? I wanna take down to Chinatown and slice him off a piece of this pumpkin pie, okay?!”

 

Nick is harassed by sudden images of Jess covered in whipped cream as she describes, in detail, all the weird sex stuff she wants to do to Paul. It is deeply unsatisfying to hear.  


“I’m good, I’m really, really good!” she cries out, finally. “And I don’t care what you think!”  
  
“...then why did you ask me?” he bites back, fiercely. He leans into her and senses they’re dancing around it again. That unnamed thing that bounces between them at the least opportune moments. Such as when there’s a guy she’s just publically declared as wanting to bone on the other side of their neighbor’s front door.  


Naturally, Paul (and everyone else) had heard everything. Nick grins as Winston ducks back in. Perfect.

 

“After you, Jess,” he says coldly, kicking the door open the rest of the way.

 

____

  


For some reason, Paul keeps beating his little music fork and making aggravating noises, in between giving Nick looks like a frequently kicked cat.  
  
“I feel like you think I’m kind of annoying,” Paul says, after moving closer to sit beside him on the old lady’s narrow, poorly padded floral sofa.  
  
“You could have said that from over there,” Nick comments. Paul tries to cover his tracks but fails. “I don’t care. I actually feel sort of sorry for you. Because at this point in your life, I know that you’ll never dislike me more than you dislike yourself.” Winston, from six inches away, overhears and quirks his eyebrow.  
  
“Really, that’s what you’re going with, violin?” When he regresses to adjectives in place of names, Nick knows it’s about three more steps to fisticuffs. Which is unfortunate, since he knows beating up the object of Jess’ affection is unlikely to gain said affection.

 

Paul slaps him on the shoulder and swirls over to Jess, muttering something to her and beginning to play. She laughs quietly as Nick scowls at the pair of them.

 

Traitorous Winston even likes Paul, which is completely against the codes of brotherdom, but whatever.

 

\----

 

Nick spoons out green beans and starts biting them aggressively in half as the others gather around to be enchanted by the violin player. Apparently he and Jess have a musical number planned. It is only stopped by the discovery of Miss Beverly’s lifeless corpse, nude from the waist down, beside the toilet.

Winston calls the cops as the rest of them wait in the hall. The coroner comes and packs her up, and the EMT’s, who had to come apparently (even though they’d told the operator several times that Miss Beverly was probably at least two days dead) wrapped the hyperventilating Paul in an emergency blanket. Schmidt eyed it jealously, and gently pulled it off his shoulders as they walked him to the elevator and handed him the violin case.

\---

They make it to Best Buy without finding any more dead people, which is actually more than can be said for some days in LA. It’s almost kind of chilly in line, and they’re all starving, contributing to their bad mood. All the delicious food Schmidt had prepared now part of a technical crime scene, at least until the death was ruled natural.

Jess rolls her eyes after Nick sarcastically remarks about the meal they didn’t get to have. “Come on, Jess, are you gonna be mad at me all night?” he asks, a bit of sadness creeping into his own voice. She won’t even look at him, arms crossed. He plays with his hands, wanting to get her attention, maybe apologize- then they all hear the violin notes drifting into the crowd. 

Genzlinger is at the horse hairs again, carrying a bag. The people ahead smile and let him pass, and Jess perks up as he approaches.

There’s no way Nick could ever make that look cross her face. She looks relieved and pleased. Nick nods, accepting this defeat. He wants her to be happy.

He gives up his place in line so Paul can stay up front with her after she hops into Paul’s arms, and turns back to start the long walk to the end.  
  
“Thanks, Nick,” she says gently as he walks off. Paul echoes her sentiment. He gets about five steps before her voice rings out again. 

“Hey, Nick.” She says his name with a little lilt and it makes him turn on a dime, everything written on his face. “Wait.” She grabs Paul’s hand and Nick looks down at where they’re joined, then back into her eyes. The rest follow the two minstrels, who burst into song as they skip off toward the darkness. Nick laughs when they go the wrong way completely.

 


	3. Bells Are Bad in Bed.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Episodes 1.7 and 1.8. As promised, the forthcoming chapters will hover around 4k words when possible!

**Chapter Three.** **  
** Bells are Bad in Bed.

 

A few days after Thanksgiving, Schmidt is lording over Nick with $80 worth of sushi and Winston’s telling them all about his temp job. It involves stuffing envelopes, and not much else.  
  
Jess pokes her head in the door. “What’s up, guys?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “Nobody has any lady guests coming over tonight, right?”

Nick scowls. “‘Lady guests’?” he asks.

Jess takes a deep breath in response, pushing the door open. She has a teacher outfit on. “And how do you feel about opening your home and your hearts to the youth of America?” A small gaggle of middle schoolers comes trailing in behind her like walkers on the Walking Dead. Except instead of looking for brains, these ones are probably looking for all his cool stuff, and booze. He feels his eyes opening wide in horror.  
  
One of the taller ones, a girl in plaid, brings in a big plastic case. “Yo Miss Day, where should be set up these bells?”  An emo-looking kid knocks over the case. Jess directs them to the kitchen table and slides down onto a couch cushion next to Schmidt. “I’m so sorry, you guys. I should have told you, but the community center decided to turn our rehearsal space back into a hallway, so…” She throws her hands around exasperatedly. “I had nowhere to go.”

Schmidt leans toward her. “Is this something that a mean, creative judge made you do?” He gestures with his chopsticks.  
  
“Yeah, this is just like a nightmare I had, where you brought over teenagers. With bells.” Nick levels his chin and stares Jess down.  
  
“These kids had a choice between early morning detention and music. And they all chose music!” she says happily.  
  
Nick feigns joy sarcastically. “No kidding?!” Jess looks past him and uses her teacher voice. “Desiree! Bells are not for hitting.” The chastised student pauses, weapon in hand. Their director turns back to Nick. “The kids wanted to play band instruments, but we got a huge donation of handbells, which are tre-tre dope.”  
  
The only student who has found her voice thus far comes striding up to the couch. “Miss Day? Can I eat some of these crackers up in here?” Schmidt rises, sushi in one palm, chopsticks in his other palm. “Oh no, no, no. Water crackers are for adults. To eat with adult cheese.”

Desiree is not impressed. “Can I eat a cracker-sushi sandwich?” she demands.

“No...Jess.” He turns to her helplessly, gesturing at Desiree. Winston jumps in. “So what, are you guys gonna sit around all night playing ‘Jingle Bells’?”  
  
Jess is immediately offended. “‘Jingle Bells’ is a trash song,” she says seriously, like it’s common knowledge. “Played on a trash instrument. And I’m not really asking permission…” She finger guns. “I’m giving you a head’s up.” Nick frowns at her. Fierce again. This seems to be a running theme with her lately, and he’s not sure if he likes it, in this instance.

“Well, that got serious,” she says awkwardly, popping up. “Anyway, you’re gonna love these kids.” She smooths down her short, red dress. His eyes flick down as she walks off to the kitchen. It’s a nice dress. And she shaved both sides of her legs to wear it. Not that he’s noticing these kinds of things, or wondering what it would feel like to run his rough palms up and down her calv-  
  
He really needs to get laid. Like, properly. Before he fails to keep his paws off his roommate.He shifts his beer and rubs at the bridge of his nose.  
  
\---  
  
He’s in the farthest corner of his room from the living room, trying to drown out the jingles from hell, when he hears her calling him.

“Toilet situation! Code One! Water only!” Nick springs into action, brushing her shoulder as he hops by. “You didn’t tell her the system? Excuse me!”

“I’m sorry, she went rogue!” Jess cries.

 

He squeezes past Desiree as Jess explains that you have to turn on the faucet before flushing the toilet in the stall, a trick he’d discovered by accident that had saved them many hours of mopping pee water off the floor. Nick pulls out the drywall square above the toilet and adjusts his fix with expert ministrations. Schmidt comes up behind Jess and crosses his arms.

“Thank you, Nick,” she says gratefully.  
  
“All right, there we go, no problem.” He dusts off his hands after putting the cover back up.  
  
“Perfect, you did it,” Schmidt replies. “The plastic soda bottle is right where it’s supposed to be. Back in the _wall hole_ .”

Nick grew up very frugally. His dad wasn’t around much, only sending money here and there, riding back into town flush with cash only to be broke a couple of days later, then gone again for a month at a time. This sort of upbringing left Nick with a certain set of skills, cleverly repairing home issues as cheaply and easily as possible. He’d learned the soda bottle trick from his uncle, and lots of little things from other family members. Sure, sometimes things still broke again, but at least they functioned halfway again instead of being completely useless and in the trash can. Hell, you could say Nick was extremely eco-conscious; he favored some extreme recycling and repurposing. Like using a roll of dimes as a table leg, or tying ice packs to a fan to cool down a room, or drilling holes in the roof to get rid of standing water, which is incidentally how they ended up with the leak in quadrant five. 

Nick dips the soap spoon into the broken dispenser, lathering up his hands before sticking them in the running water. Schmidt demands a fancy fix to the toilet situation, and he agrees.

A majestic set of notes starts floating in from the dining room. “That actually sounds really good,” Nick says, shaking his hands dry. It turns out that Winston is crazy talented at handbell ringing.  
  
\--

After the kids go home, the roommates all sit down at the table. Nick pulls on his beer as Jess lays out her plea for Winston’s assistance. She insists that kids love role models, which definitely jibes with everything Nick ever grew up with. Winston and Nick share a conversation made up entirely of facial expressions because they’ve been friends since they were babies and are cool like that.

 

\--

 

He and Schmidt are fighting about money, mostly Nick’s lack of it and his very full pride account. He works hard to fancy fix the toilet, but when it’s time to bring in a professional, it hurts his self-esteem pretty badly. There aren’t many things he can claim to be good at- frowning, drinking, underachieving, remaining alive in a room that is probably a condemnable health and safety hazard, keeping broken things working, going down on girls, and writing. Oh, and staying humble. That’s about the end of the list.

 

Nick comes back after a stop to his favorite salon (he can’t afford a haircut there, but he likes watching the ladies leave with big hair and bigger grins; it inspires his writing). He tosses his keys in the bowl and launches into a fresh round of the money argument with Schmidt.

 

“Did you plan it this way, so you could rub my face in it?” Nick demands.

“Yes, I wanted to rub your face in our working toilet.” Schmidt all but rolls his eyes. Nick plants his feet and puts his hands on his hips. “Great, well that’s a working toilet that _I will never use_ .”

“You’re never gonna go to the bathroom again?” Schmidt’s accent gets thicker when he’s mad, just like Nick.  
  
“Oh, you’re the soda bottle guy?” the plumber asks. “That was actually pretty smart,” he compliments, and Nick thanks him, completely validated.

Like most romantic fights, the situation quickly escalates to old hurts; namely, Nanny’s blanket which was ruined by Schmidt’s pitcher of Midori sours. Nick finally unplugs the TV after being kicked out of the living room, which is filled with his roommate’s belongings.

 

\--

 

Nick’s busy unfixing everything in the apartment when Jess comes to him for Winston advice, not understanding why he needs the bells concert to be some sort of competition. She throws herself between them, singing, when the basketball hoop comes down and almost brains Schmidt. The argument erupts again with accusations and insults flying fast; Jess tries to break them apart by singing, wedging herself between the two men. When that doesn’t get them to stop, she pushes against Nick’s chest lightly with her palm; they keep on fighting, anyway.

 

\--

 

In probably the worst moment of their long friendship, Schmidt tries to squeeze his conditioner out of Nick’s hair, then tries to instigate a fistfight, which culminates in Nick chasing him around trying to get a punch in. Schmidt stops abruptly and ends up calling him a loser for becoming a bartender and dropping out of law school.

 

It’s like a big crack opens up in the ground between them. Nick’s spent a good five years wondering idly when Schmidt will look around and see he’s outgrown him; it seems today is that day. Deeply wounded, Nick retreats. “Whatever, whatever, whatever, man,” he intones, pushing over a book on his way to sulk in his room.

 

\--

 

Winnie is sharing a beer with Nick on the roof, overlooking the L.A. sunset.  
  
“You know what sucks about getting older? Your friends have known you for way too long. They have too much on ya.” That’s what’s beautiful about a new friendship- there’s no history and so much learning to do about each other. For example, this week, Nick has learned that Jess’ bells give him blinding optical migraines. So much fun!  
  
“I want friends who still lie to me because they don’t wanna hurt my feelings,” Nick says, half-joking. Winston grunts in agreement. “I sadly kinda mean that,” he finishes.  
  
“What happened to us, man? We used to be so cool.” Winston begins, as Nick stares off at the horizon, reminiscing with his oldest friend. “I was gonna play basketball and be a gazillionaire…”

“And I told myself I was never gonna live with Schmidt,” he agrees.

“And who do you live with now?” Winnie asks.  
  
“I live with Schmidt,” Nick answers wryly. “And he’s killing me, Winston.” They share a chuckle and Nick takes another swallow of beer.  
  
“I got fired from a temp job,” he offers. “I got kicked out of bell group for being too mean to kids.”  
  
Winston’s competitive nature clashes with children too often, really. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Nick responds, fanning his fingers out at him, thumb holding the bottle in place.  
  
“This is a low point, I know it. You ain’t gotta talk to me about that!” They laugh again, and after Winston gets up, Nick knows where he’s going. “I’ll drive, pal,” he says in solidarity.

 

Schmidt is using the coffee table as a seating option when Nick decides to invite him along to the concert. They decide to work things out without actually discussing them; burying emotional trauma deeply and leaving it undisturbed is a valued Miller family tradition, after all. Schmidt grabs his cardigan and jogs off after them.

 

\--

 

Ensembell is ready to rock the bells when the guys find them on the park stage. They give the homeless dude shadowboxing a wide berth, and when Jess invites him up, Bishop doesn’t hesitate, pulling on his coordinated team shirt and grabbing some handbells. They butcher a song that kind of resembles “Eye of the Tiger”, if, for some horrific reason, it was being played by a team of cats that only had the bells on their collars with which to convey the melody. And if half the cats had just been run over by a truck.

 

And Nick will always hate Schmidt’s “cardi”.

 

                                                                 -----

 

When Nick gets off from the bar the next day, he’s bone-tired. So tired that he has no energy to shower, or change, or even make it to his bed. The bed that is kind of still filled with stains from rotting food, and he isn’t going to deal with it, so he falls asleep on the couch.

 

He wakes up to the door opening, and moans of pleasure, and loud kissing noises. He opens one bleary eye and then the other, assuming it’s Schmidt and one of his “friends”, and is surprised to see that it’s Jess and Paul, macking each other’s faces off.

 

They don’t notice his presence; they’re too busy with each other, Jess grinning as her top comes off, revealing her red bra. They make weird noises and off goes Paul’s shirt; she wraps her arms around his neck and goes back to kissing him; Nick decides to write it off and go back to sleep.

Unfortunately, that means that Sleeping Nick is free to play with those fresh images in whatever way he sees fit. Which means that he has a dream that Jess is staring at him with big, dark eyes, pupils blown huge with desire, and he just grabs her and kisses her. Then, because of dream magic, her red dress is now just a red bra and matching underwear, and he’s on the receiving end of the little sexy grin he saw her give Paul. And he can hear her moan with pleasure as he wraps his hand around her waist, palm spanning around it, his fingertips on her spine, thumb dipped in her belly button. Thanks to the nakedness incident, he knows all too well what lies under the push up cups of her hot little lingerie number, and he flicks it off with one hand, way easier than he ever has in reality. The garment falls forward and off, and he bends, taking one dark nipple in his mouth, and she cards her fingers through his hair, tugging and pulling. “Your hair is so long, Nicholas,” she sighs. “Too long.”

The dream abruptly shifts to him in a salon chair; the same salon he’s been visiting. “Dammit,” he mumbles, then he’s falling through a cloud made of gravy.  
Sleeping Nick is one wild guy.

 

He makes a hair appointment the next day.

 

\---

 

Jess comes in as Nick debates the merits of various haircutting establishments with the other guys. She announces that she’ll be having sex with Paul that evening, by using metaphors that involve maple trees and syrup. Apparently, she doesn’t think the whole thing through, considering that means she’d be injuring Paul and then sucking out his life force. Or maybe she’s into that, and Jess is much darker in bed than she lets on.  
  
Not that Nick would know. Or wants to know. I mean, aside from the obvious. What he is sure of is that he wants no details about this unholy pedagogical private part partaking. It’s bad enough that he’s sure he’ll be able to hear parts of it, being… you know, right on the other side of the hall. The loft has thin walls as it is.

 

“Why are you telling us this?” Nick asks, out loud. The riot continues in his head, unabated.

 

“'Cause I want to. I want to give you a heads up,” she answers. Schmidt asks if she’s nervous, and she makes a crack about driving stick. Nick looks her up and down and bites his bottom lip a little. Sleeping Nick will definitely be revisiting that one…

 

\---

 

Nick decides that there’s nothing he can’t learn from the internet, so he looks up a video on how to give himself a haircut. Despite Winston yelling at him to go to his barber shop and Schmidt offering the services of his salon, Nick really, really hates being touched by strangers- especially on the head. It’s way too weird.

 

The guy in the video kind of looks like Schmidt when he was heavy. He stabs himself about a minute in, and it is sickeningly fascinating to watch the blood spurt. He and Winston rewatch it a couple times before agreeing that Nick will just go to the damn barber shop, no matter how fast they talk and uncool they make him feel.

 

\--

 

When they get home, Jess asks for their help. Specifically, with sex. Which is something Sleeping Nick really would find interesting… but anyway. She’s serious. She wants pointers. She’s been watching Schmidt’s red folder of pornography for _five hours_.

 

Nick has seen maybe five minutes of the red folder; it was enough to scar him for life.

 

“Tell me what guys like in bed, right now!” she cries. She’s panicking about sleeping with someone new, after Spencer, in six years.

 

“When you reach… completion… “ she grimaces, and Nick can’t listen anymore. “Yeah, that was it,” he announces, rising from the couch. “I can’t do this, Jess!” (He can’t talk about sex with a girl he wants to have sex with, but can’t, for many, many reasons.)  “No wait, come back here!” she calls after him. When he hears Schmidt saying something ridiculous about being enchanted and whisked away, he turns face and comes back.  
  
“Just take your clothes off, Jess,” Nick advises sagely, simply.

 

“Do you think Paul watches stuff...like that?” She turns the screen over, and two girls are riding one dude- one is on his face, the other on his dick. The guys agree that this is a normal scene, though the one girl is probably a pro, since she’s multi-tasking really well.

 

Jess shows them her “moves”; they kind of resemble a slow-motion epileptic fit, without being naked. The guys alternatively smile and look afraid; their preferences vary wildly, evidently. She mentions light choking, which a firmly a NO for Nick.

 

“So you guys really think you’re better at sex than me?” he demands.

 

“Absolutely. What did you do after you lost your virginity?” Winston asks. “What did you say to me?”

“Don’t say that right now! You’re taking it out of context!” Nick blurts.

 

Winston looks at Jess. “He said, ‘Winston, is it okay that I didn’t get my pants all the way off?’” Nick rolls his eyes and shifts his beer to the other hand as Schmidt verifies the tale.

 

“I was _sixteen years old_ ,” Nick replies. “And I’ve gotten a lot better.”

 

Jess cuts off Schmidt’s embarrassing story about Nick and Caroline screwing in college and sounding like trapped miners.  

 

After she suggests flicking, for some ungodly reason, and then starts using an old timey newscaster’s voice, Nick is still preoccupied with his friends believing he’s bad in bed. “So you’re telling me for the last 15 years you’ve thought I’m bad at sex?” he asks. “I’m fantastic at sex!” The women in his life have seemed to think so, anyway. They almost always climaxed and tended to come back for more, so empirical evidence suggested he was doing a good job with it.

 

“Dude? You’re scared to get a haircut.”

 

“Yeah I don’t like getting a haircut, it’s too intimate. What does that have to do with sex?” Because, of course, it’s being intimate with a stranger- and Nick likes to know the women he goes to bed with, generally. Unless there’s copious amounts of alcohol involved. He wishes he could be more like the stereotypical guy, but he enjoys it all a lot more when he can trust his partner, which only comes from… emotional intimacy.

 

“Jess, who do you think, of the three of us, is the best at sex?” Schmidt asks.

 

“Yes,” Nick agrees with this query. Schmidt, ever quick on the uptake, sweeps his hand across the air. “And take emotion out of it.” (Because Schmidt watches, and sees, and knows the little dance they’re doing, though he’s too kind to comment.) “No one’s feelings are going to get hurt, especially Nick and Winston’s.”  
  
“No, I’m not doing this,” she says emphatically.

 

“Say a name,” Nick encourages.

 

“Go with your gut,” Winston leads.

 

There’s a knock at the door.

 

“Hey, Paul!” Jess tiptoes away, pulling down her flared black skirt as she goes, ending the conversation without answering. They call each other ‘goose’ and kiss awkwardly.

 

She heads off to get changed, and Paul hangs out with them on the couch. Schmidt has wisely closed the laptop. They head off for their date, and Nick finishes his beer, then two more, so he’s deeply asleep when they come back in. Thank God.

\---

 

Nick goes and gets his haircut the next morning at the barber shop, before the rest of the loft wakes up. Aside from some awkwardness with a man who may or may not have been Danny Glover’s grandfather, it is a lot of fun.

 

They give him some spikey bits at the top, and shave a little swirl over his ear. It looks pretty cool.

 

Jess comes in for breakfast right as he’s going over the experience with Winston. Her matching pajama outfit today is a dark navy with white edges.  
  
“How’d it go?” “Yeah, is he still in there, Jess?” the guys ask.

 

She holds up her empty tea box sullenly, turning. “There’s no more tea,” she says in a broken voice. “I forgot to buy tea.” She throws the box and turns away, striding back to her room. She throws all the decorative tennis balls into the living room as she passes the decorative ball bowl, and the guys share a look.

 

Schmidt’s conquest of the previous evening comes out, doing the walk of shame with a pacifier still around her neck. “Where’s the door?” she asks quietly. They direct her out, then head for Jess’ room.

 

“You okay, Jess?” Nick asks.

 

She’s sitting, arms crossed, leaned up against her pillow. She has a new bed outfit; it’s mostly white now. “I messed up. He ran away, he got scared.” She looks down at her knees.

 

“Why would he be scared?” Winston asks.

 

“Because I choked him,” she responds. “I lightly choked him.”

 

“Wow, that’s what happens when you listen to Schmidt.” Winston shakes his head.

 

“It’s just, when I was with Spencer I didn’t even think about this stuff, I just did it.” Her voice is raw with pent-up frustration and hurt. Nick pulls up her chair to the edge of the bed.

 

“Okay, here’s the thing,” he sighs. “You gotta stop thinkin’ about it. Just relax and be yourself. You’re awesome,” he says. Too many cards on the table, but whatever. She meets his gaze for a moment, then looks up. “What do you think, Winston?”  
  
She’s not a fan of his new hair, she thinks it makes him look bad in bed, so instead of listening to Nick, she listens to Winston, who is literally saying the same stuff Nick is. Which is just ridiculous. Just the same, he never has that haircut again.

\--

 

Nick is pretty sure that Jess and Paul fucked for the first time in the elevator, because they both have that after-sex smirky thing going on when they all head to the movies together later, and he spots Jess’ shoe in the corner.

  
That poor, abused elevator sees a lot over the years that the gang lives in apartment 4D.


	4. The 23rd and the Story of the 50.

**Chapter Four.  
** The 23rd and the Story of the 50.

 

Nick, Schmidt, and Winston all wake up the morning of December 23rd to beautifully wrapped gifts at the foot of their beds. They all contain roller skates, which the guys put on, and then laugh about when they see they’ve all coordinated accidently. They let Jess sleep in (and Nick sends up a silent prayer on behalf of their downstairs neighbors).

 

Nick has a crazy-early flight the next day, but they are all gonna hang out at Schmidt’s office party, so they will get some “quality family time”, as Jess insists on calling it, before he heads home to Chicago and his actual (crazy) family. Or at least whichever parts of it drag themselves back at the same time he and Winston do.

 

She comes running in, keys in hand (guess she’s not sleeping in, which explains how she crept in while they all were) and asks the guys to come with her to find a Christmas present for Paul. Somehow, Nick ends up being the only one willing to actually help her; Schmidt and Winston head off on their own mission as soon as they get inside the mall.

 

She can’t decide between a gag gift and something serious, she explains.

 

“Well, I think you’ve gotta figure out what you feel about him then get a gift that reflects it,” Nick advises. For instance, he is trying desperately to feel nothing untoward toward her, so he’s gotten her...nothing, he realizes belatedly. “I think that’s kinda the move.” He stares off at the Christmas decorations.

 

“My initial thought was to get him a gift certificate for piping hot sex,” Jess admits, pulling out a little green card. Nick’s eyebrows shoot up, and he pulls the card out of her hand when she holds it close. “But I don’t want him to think I’m only using him for his body.”

Nick opens the card. “Oh, I’m sure he’d be okay with that,” he projects. The card is hand-lettered and painted on the inside with silver letters.  
  
“‘Nerdy weird sex that works for both of us’”? This is amazing. I’m gonna keep this,” Nick teases. She grabs at it and he flings his arm out of her reach. “I’m gonna cash this in one night and get some weird nerd sex with ya.” She keeps trying and he keeps moving it around. “Oh my god, thank you! Now I know what I’m getting my mom.” They both laugh as he takes off, her chasing behind him. She gets the card back, eventually.  
  
(A couple of years later, he makes one for her, during their relationship. It doesn’t have any pretty silver paint, but it says the same thing, right down to the little copyright symbol next to his name.)

 

She ends up buying a realistic beating toy heart at the teacher supply store. Nick thinks it’s a good choice, and besides, it’s a teacher to teacher gift, hard to go wrong there.

 

She takes them by one of her favorite places, Candy Cane Lane, in the daylight. At night, it’s apparently all lit up and beautiful.

 

He tells her they won’t have time to stop on the way, but Nick knows now what he’s getting her for Christmas.

 

\---

 

They all meet up at the Associated Strategies party and walk in together; there’s visible tension between Jess and Paul, and as soon as he sees her break off into the crowd, Nick follows her.

 

“Hey, what’s wrong, Jess?” he asks. She looks up at him thankfully, glad to have someone to talk to. “Hey,” she greets softly. She looks down as he comes in to stand close to her side. He nibbles on some cookie in his mouth.

 

“Paul told me he loved me,” she sighs; mid-chew, Nick flashes his eyebrows and makes an alarmed grunt. “And I couldn’t say it back, so I… said ‘thank you’.” He frowns. “Which is horrible. I don’t know what to do, because I’m always the one who loves more. That’s my thing.” She emphasizes with her palms, fingers spread; he swallows. “One time, I went on a date, and by 11 pm, I gave the guy my ATM code.”  
  
“What is your ATM code?” Nick says seriously.  
  
“423-” she looks at him and they laugh. “Very funny! Very good try, but, no…”  
  
“Not a try, I got it,” he says playfully. “If you don’t have feelings for Paul, you’ve gotta tell him,” he says. He doesn’t want to see her hurt, but he also has never liked Paul, so Nick isn’t too broken up over the situation. And if she doesn’t even have feelings for the guy, well…

 

“I can’t do that on Christmas! And then it’s gonna be New Years…” She lists off every major holiday for the next six months.  
  
“Hard to argue with that logic,” Nick says, softly and sarcastically. “Just tell him. Don’t lead him on. You’ll just hurt him more.” She looks out into the crowd, lifts her shoulders, bites her lower lip. She turns and faces him, at last. “Okay. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna tell him.”  
  
“You are?” he mumbles.

 

“Yeah.” She strides off, and he watches her go.

 

\---

 

Fifteen minutes later, Nick’s done scarfing cookies from the cookie bar (in lieu of alcohol, who offers _cookies_?) so he does a loop of the hall, looking for Jess. He sees Paul out on a balcony and goes to console him. It’s not like Paul is a bad guy- he’s just not the one meant for Jess.

 

He pats Paul gently on the arm. “Hey, man,” he greets. Paul looks relieved to have someone to talk to. “How’re you doin, Paul?” “Good,” the other man responds. Nick scans his face then sees the answer. “Has Jess not talked to you?”

 

So it turns out that Nick ends up being the one to tell Paul that Jess doesn’t love him, because of bad communication. “That’s not to say she’s not gonna fall in love with you later,” Nick says hopefully.  
  
The rest of the conversation goes about as well as expected. It’s a new first for him and Jess- she ruined his first hookup after they met, so it’s just fair play that he decimated her first relationship. Right?

 

He ends up hugging the guy.

 

Jess finally makes an appearance.  She automatically goes to stand beside Nick.  
  
...She is not pleased by his accidental revelation to Paul.

 

“That’s a lie. I told him you don’t love him, Jess.”  
  
Jess starts yelling. “WHAT?” She demands. Nick bends and cowers for a second for turning to point at Paul. “Are you kidding me?!”  
  
“I thought you’d already talked to him!” he defends.  
  
“That is not your information to share!” she berates.  
  
“I totally regret it,” Nick babbles. He tries to escape through the door.  
  
It’s locked.

 

“Please! This is my nightmare!” He pulls frantically at the handle as Jess swears she’s going to kill him. Nick screams for his other friends and pounds at the glass like a mime in a cube filling with water.

 

\----

 

Jess breaks off her conversation with Paul to use her teacher voice on Nick.

 

“Sit down and be quiet!” she orders. He crosses his arms, turns, and slides down the door, folding onto the ground and staring at them like a poorly disciplined toddler.

 

His cell phone goes off and it’s his Ma.

 

“I can’t talk right now, I’m in a weird situation.”

“Are you stoned?” she asks.

“No, I’m not high, I’m done with that phase,” he smiles at the nonplussed educators five feet away. “I promise you. I won’t miss my flight. Okay, I love you, mama. Bye.”

 

“You done?” Jess snarks at him. Paul has his head in his hands.

 

Jess wants to slow the relationship down a little, which is perfectly reasonable, she’s only known the guy like two months after all. (He’s known her for three.) But Paul doesn’t want to. That’s when Nick can’t hold his tongue anymore.

 

“Woah, all she’s asking you to do is slow it down a little bit, how’s that-”  
  
“Nick,” she cuts him off warningly. He falls silent.

 

\---

 

They’re having the slowest breakup conversation in the world.

 

Ten minutes later, Jess and Paul are still saying sad stuff to each other. Nick gets tired of being against the wall so he moves over and sinks down next to Jess.

 

“I’m sorry, Jess, I just- I don’t wanna slow down, with you. It’s just not natural. So if you need to, then- I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  
  
She turns away from Paul, looks up at the stars, then straight ahead.  
  
“Okay,” she says in a tired voice.

 

“Come on, Paul!” Nick yells. “It’s Christmas! Don’t break up with her on-”  
  
Jess reaches over and smooths her hand over Nick’s arm; Paul tries to soothe her. “It’s okay…”  
  
Nick sinks his head into his hands; he feels like he’s the one who got dumped.

 

Winston comes out and Nick escapes the emotional overload like a fat kid running into an ice cream palace.

 

\---

 

Nick ends up driving Jess’ car to the airport with the whole gang in the back.  
  
“What kind of airline has flights at 3 am?” Winston asks.  
  
“The kind I can afford,” Nick replies.

 

Jess is very subdued in the passenger seat. He knows she’s hurting, so he is definitely going to miss his flight. Sorry, Ma.

 

“Mmkay, there’s something we gotta do. Sorry,” he apologizes, cutting the wheel sharply to the left. He pulls a u-turn and heads back toward the wealthy neighborhoods behind them. Everyone yells at him, but he ignores them and presses on the gas.

 

\---

 

Candy Cane Lane is shut down for the evening. The blow-up people are deflating; the lights are off. It’s a real disappointment. ( _You’re a disappointment and not enough for her_ , something whispers deep inside his head.)

 

“I think we’re too late, Nick,” she says sadly.

 

“Yeah, this was supposed to be your gift, Jess,” he answers bitterly. “I screwed it up. I’m sorry.”

He puts the car in park and cuts out the headlights and the engine. They all get out.  
  
“Candy Cane Lane is shut down. Shoulda gotten her perfume, man,” Schmidt says.  
  
“Nice, Schmidt.” Nick shakes his head and sneaks a look at Jess. “Man,” she says quietly.  
  
“Yeah,” he agrees. He leans back on the car and she comes up, just beside him, brushing against him. “I have the worst timing,” she says. He brings his arms up across his chest, pushing back against her, looking down at their feet. “I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  
  
Her voice cracks a little. “Let’s go, we should just go.” He turns to face her and she looks up at him. “No, we don’t-” he starts, but she’s already turning, going for the car door handle.  
  
“Jess, no. It’s Christmas! It’s _our_ Christmas. We came here to see the lights!” He raises his arm around, gesturing helplessly, tapping on the hood of the car.  
  
“Well what are we gonna do?” she asks sullenly.

 

He can be a man of few words, sometimes.

 

Winston wants to know what he’s doing, Schmit interjects too, but he wants the damn lights on, for her, for her present.

 

He bangs on the front door of the nearest tackily decorated house. “Excuse me, guys!” Jess is bundled up, watching him with interest.

 

“Excuse me, we have a girl out here who’d really like to see the lights!” Nick yells. “Sorry to wake you, this is rude, but make it the Candy Cane Lane or whatever! You spent all this time to show off, so do it, show off! You got an audience! This whole neighborhood is ridiculous.” Nick turns and Jess is smiling; Schmidt starts to laugh. “You all show off, so turn on the lights!”

 

It becomes the group’s rallying cry. “Turn on your lights!” they all shout.  
  
“That snowman is dead!” Jess cries, and Nick agrees. After a minute or so, the first house lights up brilliantly, like a beacon. “Oooohhh!” they yell. All the other houses turn on their decorations, one by one, and Nick puts his arm around Jess’ shoulder, side-hugging her briefly as he high-fives with the others. They all hug and wish each other Merry Christmas until a guy shouts “Merry Christmas, now stop yelling before I call the cops!”

 

Nick misses his flight, but it’s kind of worth it because Jess is smiling again.

 

                                                            -------

 

The story of the $50 begins with Schmidt’s party bus getting canceled because it has been re-reserved for D-list celebrity Frankie Muniz.

 

There’s also Julia.

 

When she first sits at the end of the bar at the Griffin, all alone, Nick looks up and thinks, for a split second, that she’s Jess. Superficially, they look alike; the dark curtain of hair, the bangs, the petite frame, the pretty face. He smiles before registering that it’s a stranger, and she smiles back, and then he takes her order and brings her beer. She writes her number on the bar’s copy of the credit card receipt instead of a tip. He calls her anyway.  
  
The others aren’t very involved; when he slips out of the loft for three weekends in a row, everyone just seems to assume he’s working extra shifts since Amanda quit right after the whole nakedness incident. But instead, he goes to dinner with Julia, then to an art gallery opening, then to dinner again (but this time, they go back to her place and make out, hot and heavy), and then to a movie.  
  
It’s after the movie that they fuck for the first time. Julia’s apartment is small and neat; all the furniture has clean, modern lines, and most of it is monochromatic. She keeps the lights down low and pulls off her sleek black dress to show off her slim body framed in black lace. Her nipples peek through the sheer bra, and her butt is framed beautifully by the matching thong. He runs his thumbs roughly over the cups and she groans, hooking her legs around his hips, pulling him close to grind against her. In the unfamiliar environment with a new girl, Nick has no problems shutting off his brain and letting his body do the talking. He rips her underwear in his haste to get close to her skin; he runs his palms up over her thighs and hips, tastes her briefly before shucking off his shirt, jeans, and boxers. Almost as an afterthought, she scoots over to the switch and hits the lights; and he’s thankful. In the fumbling of rolling on the condom and then the intense sensations of _hot-wet-tight_ that burn through his first few thrusts, he doesn’t have to close his eyes and think of blue ones. In the dark, it’s the same.  
  
That’s what he tells himself, anyway.

 

\---

 

Their fifth date is going to a lawyer fundraiser party. Because Julia is a lawyer. Like Nick should be by now if he hadn’t car bombed his own future with laziness. Just thinking about being around them all makes his arms itch. He puts on his jury duty pants and paces the kitchen, and Schmidt announces that his party is ruined due to D-list actor Frankie Muniz.  
  
Jess decides she is going to throw Schmidt a party. This is a bad idea for so many damn reasons, it’s hard for Nick to think of them all.

 

“Jess, Schmidt’s world is different than ours. They speak a different language. They shorten every word to one syllable. He once called an oven an “oves”. He calls an airport “airp.””

 

“He calls ketchup “ketch”,” Winston adds helpfully.  
  
“Last month, he went to a party called ‘Bros before Hoes on the Moon’. What does that even mean?!” Nick intones. “And the dress code was yacht flair.”

 

Jess giggles a little. “...what?”  
  
“Schmidt has a friend who legally changed his middle name to “doin’it,” Winston mutters disgustedly.

 

“Yeah, doin’it,” Nick confirms.  
  
“One word, just, “doin’it”.”  
  
“You are not emotionally, mentally, and spiritually prepared to throw these D-bags a party,” Nick emphasizes his point with his hands. Jess doesn’t believe him; he can read it in her eyes.  
  
“I’m gonna do some research,” she says firmly. Nick gives it up as a lost cause.

“Actually, I do have to go, I apologize,” he says, grabbing his coat. They let him leave while actually saying, “Mumble, mumble, mumble.”  
  
\--

 

Julia has green eyes, Nick realizes, as she botches a Bill Cosby impression at the fancy lawyer party.

He’s never looked at them that closely before. Which is kind of sad. Because he really likes this girl, so far.

Because he never wants to go back to the loft with her (because of his roommates, well one in particular, that he’s really doing rather well with not thinking about in agreement-violating ways, really, hell, he’d finally slept with someone other than Caroline, and it was good sex, not great, but satisfying) Julia has apparently leapt to the conclusion that he’s married.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I am not married!” Nick cries. “I am the opposite of married. Before you, there was like- there was nothing. I’ve got like, no girls on the horizon- _(It’s hard to be on the horizon when she’s floating right across the hall._ )-in a hot way,” he finishes lamely.

“Well, then why don’t you ever invite me to your place, or like, tell me all that much about yourself? It’s weird. I don’t even know where you live,” Julia says reasonably.

“I’m 30 years old and I live in a loft with three roommates,” Nick admits. 

  
“...in a hot way. But maybe you can kiss my butt when I talk like Bill Cosby.”  
  
Somehow, that line works on her. Which should have been a sign that he was violating the “don’t stick your dick in crazy” principle. But, hindsight is 20-20.

 

\---

 

Julia’s eyes triangulate between him and Jess when he brings her to Jess’ room to introduce his date to his roommates. A little checkbox is audibly ticked, Nick thinks. Julia is smart- she is a lawyer, for chrissake.

 

They go to his room and he gets really friendly with her breasts, which are also very nice. They fit perfectly in his hands, and she rides him until she comes with a little sigh. She doesn’t stay- early deposition tomorrow- but that’s okay.

 

\---

 

Friday night rolls around, and Julia shows up for the party. Naturally, Jess has secured an actual school bus and school bus driver for the party and has made crafty little decorations for all the surfaces, and even some slip covers. It looks like the 70’s threw up and the stomach contents consisted of a patriotic Jello mold and flowers.  
  
“This is like, your world, huh?” Julia asks. Nick shakes his head.  
  
“It is! It’s you in your natural habitat. It’s fascinating.” She snarls a little, playfully. When Jess gets snarky, there’s always an edge of sweetness to her, but Julia is all sharp edge and broken glass. She’s a lioness. Jess is sort of like a zebra, gentle unless provoked, and she stands out from a crowd in a wild outfit.  
  
(Nick is a Marabou Stork.)

 

“I’m just here for Schmidt, I don’t know any of these people,” the stork insists, lest the lioness believe he’s a douchebag too.

 

The whole package of douches rolls up just as they reference them. They greet the loft mates and the birthday boy himself.

 

After watching Schmidt sing his terrible Tootsie roll song, Julia turns back to him.

“You really live with that guy,” she says, half-pityingly. He nods as she continues. “Does he like, tuck his shiny jeans into his boots when he goes out at night?”

Nick puts his hands on his hips.

  
“You know, the truth is I met Schmidt a long time ago when we were in college and he was a sweet, chubby Communications major who wore cargo shorts, and-”

She cuts him off. “I’m actually just messing with you. Seriously! I think all of your friends seem completely awesome, and, nice, and fun, so… relax.” She pushes his shoulder reassuringly.  
  
“You don’t have to say that. They’re my friends. You can tease them.”  
  
“I don’t wanna tease them-” Nick speaks over her. “I tease them all the time! Schmidt’s a D-bag, But, like, not in a bad way. And Jess is a total nut. And Winston is like this, competitive maniac who loves ‘Sister, Sister’ and is, like, afraid of thunder-” he says, like it’s the most ridiculous thing, mostly because it is. “But I’m the voice of reason-”  
  
“He’s behind you,” she warns.  
  
“Right now he is?” he asks.  
  
“Currently,” she affirms.

Nick smiles roguishly.  “And he’s also one of my best friends.” He turns and Winston is holding the cake box, looking displeased. “Oh no, keep going,” he says sarcastically.  
  
“So you wanna go on the bus?” Julia says swiftly. Nick agrees hastily, then turns as soon as she’s out of earshot. “I’m really sorry, I just had to show off,” he half-whispers. Winston has no empathy. “Oh, I’m bringing you down,” he promises.  
  
They all get on the bus.  
  
\---

 

After they park at the lake, everyone wants Nick to take a shot of Bro Juice, which he invented at Schmidt’s 22nd birthday party. As a poor and aspiring bartender, he was inspired to mix vodka with all kinds of heinous shit, like Sunny D. When Jess adds her voice to those calling, he takes off his jacket.  
  
“This is not going to be attractive,” he warns Julia.

“We’re way too old for this, you realize,” he comments. Then Nick grabs the handles. “Happy birthday, brother. I love ya.”

He takes a few big swallows of Bro Juice right from the cooler. The alcohol hits his system pretty quick and things get nice and mellow.

\--

 

They get back on the bus, and Jess announces they’re going somewhere else; Nick can’t hear where. Julia is very quiet and tucked in the corner, so Nick starts apologizing to her. She’s too smart and normal for his weird little world. But she gets angry when he basically says as much.

“I have stuff that you don’t know about!” she insists. Nick tells her about the workout Huey Lewis and the dinosaur theories. “I don’t think you have stuff, you’re just perfect,” he grins drunkenly.

 

Nick notices Schmidt get up and kneel down by Jess; for some reason, Benjamin has her stuffed up against the window, and she looks so uncomfortable that he immediately goes on high alert. When the two men stand up, with Winston popping up a second later, Nick goes to his feet, too, maneuvering awkwardly to back them up.

 

“Hey, you know what, curly? If you don’t like the bus, then get off it, pal!” Nick yells, pointing his cup full of Bro Juice. “It’s Schmitty's birthday, bro.” He smiles fondly and taps the birthday boy on the shoulder.

 

“You guys suck!” Benjamin proclaims.

 

“Let me talk to him, you guys, I’m a lawyer,” Julia calls, appearing behind them. The guys let her pass through.

 

“Hi, why don’t you just say that one more time?” she challenges. Benjamin, like an idiot, repeats his insult.  
  
Julia straight-up attacks him. As the limbs fly, Jess falls, people are pushed, and the bus driver loses control. The bus slams into something that sounds heavy and grinds to a halt.

Nick looks wildly between Julia and Jess, eyes so wide they might be popping out of his head. Jess struggles to get up, asking if everyone’s okay; she makes it up and stands close beside him. Julia turns, looking embarrassed.  
  
“Who are you?!” Nick demands.

 

\---

 

So it turns out that Julia has anger issues. Like, assault-charge, court-ordered-therapy level anger issues.

Nick’s at a weird place in his life. She’s a bit like Jess, if Jess was a ruthless, trained killer.

He reaches over, pulls Julia in by her pretty flower-stem neck, and he kisses her. And no one cares that he does, and no one is going to yell at him for it, and she’s just a girl he’s dating, not a best friend he lives with, so it’s okay that her craziness turns him on.

They get a taxi back to the loft. “Bye Bro Juice!” Jess calls. “Thank you for that,” he says sarcastically. They manage to get back into the apartment before he rips her clothes off.

\---

It’s a bit disconcerting when he wakes up the next morning to someone who sounds like Jess urgently whispering his name. He mumbles, “Jess,” then tries to go back to sleep, but the voice is insistent. He opens his eyes, and she’s a foot from his face, clad in pajama outfit covered in parrots. Julia snoozes on obliviously on the other side of the bed.

“I need to talk to you!” she murmurs frantically.  
  
“Give me a sec, I’ll meet you in the den,” Nick says, mindful of his very urgent need to pee coupled with his morning erection. He gets it all sorted then finds her curled in her corner, teacup in hand. She’s fixed his coffee and it sits on the table.

 

She launches right into it as he takes a sip; he nearly spits it out.

 

“He tried to KISS you?” Nick stage-whispers.

 

“He leaned in, eyes closed! It was the worst moment of my life!” she wails softly. “So incredibly awkward! And that was my high school superlative- _Most Awkward_ !”  
  
“Of course it was,” he says. “This is at least $50 in the damn jar.” Considering the No-Nail Oath was _Schmidt’s fucking idea_ , him trying to nail Jess’ mouth was outrageous. Not that she ever needed to know about any of that, of course.

 

Nick goes and bangs on Schmidt’s door; this wakes Winston, too. He can hear the shower start and knows Julia’s found her way out of his room as well.

 

They have a family discussion and agree that this is the worst (and thus should be the most expensive) douchebag moment yet. Just because he’d defended Jess from his douchebag friend does not mean that he should try to hook up with her, even if he was drunk and it was his birthday. Julia comes out in a sexy little sock-and-short combo and lays in his lap like a cat; he puts an arm around her hip. Jess’ fuzzy-socked feet brush against his other side.

 

Schmidt peels a $50 of his B-Day money from his wallet and stuffs it in the jar. He still insists that Jess had fuzz on her face for at least the next ten years.  
  



	5. Jess, Julia and the Landlord.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick's got a girl without a label, and the apartment has many safety hazards and a big secret.

**Chapter Five.**   
  
Jess, Julia and the Landlord.

  


Nick’s bed happens to have some sheets on it that weren’t bought on sale at Target; they’re the Miller Family Sheets, sent with him when he went off to college by his misty-eyed mother.  
  
He tells Julia as much when they’re laying in bed together one morning. She disappears into the bathroom, and Nick knows it’s time to interfere when he hears Schmidt ranting about his sculpting chutney.

 

“Hey Julia, I’ll see you later tonight!” Jess chirps from her sink as Julia leaves, too weirded out to stay and heading to get ready in Nick’s room. Julia’s response isn’t nearly as enthusiastic.

 

Nick asks Jess “why” wordlessly, with a gesture and a look.  
  
“She’s helping me get out of a traffic ticket,” Jess justifies.   
  
“Jess, are you seriously using the girl I’m sleeping with for free legal advice?” Nick questions.   
  
Jess mockingly curves her hand around her ear. “Oh, I’m sorry, the girl you’re sleeping with?!” She gestures with her hairbrush. “I mean, you can’t call her your girlfriend?” It’s rather surprising that Jess even cares.   
  
He shrugs. “We’re not labeling it.” He frowns deeply.   
  
She starts doing a weird voice, very deep. “Oh, you’re not labeling it? Cause you’re too sophisticated?” She does a big shrug.   
  
“Don’t do your sophisticated guy!” Nick says. She twirls around, ignoring him.   


“That’s not how a sophisticated man dances,” Winston interjects.  


“How does a sophisticated man dance?” she responds.

 

“I’m too sophisticated, I don’t believe in labeling,” Winston sings, putting his hand up like he’s in a historical movie about miscommunications like Pride and Prune Juice, or the Green Mile. The kind Jess likes to watch to make her feel worldly and cultured.   
  
After that sad display, everyone decides that Winston needs to get laid; he decides to call an old flame, Shelby.   


\---

 

Nick comes home from work and finds Jess and Julia on the couch. Julia looks a little terrified; Jess looks angry.   
  
“Nick, hey!” Julia calls instantly.  “Wanna hang out in your room?” Her tone leaves no room for argument. “Sure,” he agrees. “Jess, if you’ll excuse us, Julia is about to be very disappointed.” She stands up instantly and turns to Jess. “Okay, so I’ll look at the stuff some more, I’ll call some people, see what I can do.” She drops some cloth next to Jess, and a cruel edge creeps into her voice. “Here’s your blankie back.”   


Jess watches her go, then looks up at Nick, and there’s hurt in her eyes. “Power blazer,” Nick intones as Julia walks by; she hands him a cupcake. Jess immediately begins to wrap herself up in all the blankets around her and turns away.  


“So what’s going on with the ticket?” he asks briskly, feeling like he should linger with her a while because she’s his friend and there’s something going on between the two women, and he’s not sure if bros before hoes is a thing when the friend is not, strictly speaking, a bro, but whatever. He’s trying to follow his gut.

 

She gets up, carrying her desserts. She marches right up to him and leans in, speaking softly, but resolutely. “She has a problem with me, Nick. Okay? She doesn’t like me.”  


He drops his voice too and cocks his head at her. “Hey, what are you talking about?”   


“You don’t understand, cause you’re a guy.”  
  
“She does not have a problem with you,” he responds. “She’s just…” He shrugs his shoulders around like an aggressive boxer.   
  
“Nick, _your girlfriend’s not a dessert person_ ,” she declares, as though that explains everything. She shoves the plate in his hand and disappears into her room, leaving him with two cupcakes, two cookies, and a headache.

 

\--

 

When they get back to his room, Julia is aloof. She pulls off her blazer and undershirt, then sits down on the mattress, kicking off her heels.  
  
“So did you and that Jess girl hook up, or?...” she asks.   
  
“What?” Nick demands. He stops unbuttoning his flannel.   


“So then it was Winston or the other one? Schminst?”   
  
“Schmidt? No, she didn’t hook up with Winston or Schmidt,” he answers, annoyed. He scrubs his hands through his hair as he sinks down into his computer chair, backward. It’s the same one Jess has because they bought them at the same time on their first IKEA trip with Winston.   


The chair tilts dangerously and almost dumps him on his ass; he adjusts, carefully.

 

“What is her deal? What kind of woman chooses to live with three guys when she isn’t sleeping with any of them?” Julia asks seriously. She flops back on the mattress, and despite everything, the enticing way her breasts fall out of her cups is a little sexy. And she has a nice, toned set of abs that want his tongue to outline them…  
  
“She’s just… Jess. She doesn’t want to fuck any of us, and we don’t want to fuck her. We’re four platonic roommates, why is that so hard for you people to understand?” He drops his tone the second he realizes he’s said “you people”.   
  
“You people? Hah, that’s great. Who are “we” then? Outsiders to the little 4-D roommate club?” She rolls her eyes. “There’s something weird about a girl who puts blankets on people without them asking.”   
  
“She doesn’t want people to be cold,” he says distantly. He reaches over and grabs one of the cupcakes, shoving half into his mouth in one bite. Red velvet. It’s divine. Jess is crazy, but she’s a fantastic baker.   
  
“She baked two forms of dessert for our meeting,” she continues. “Cookies and cake.”   
  
“It’s not a cake, it’s a _cup_ cake, and she didn’t do that for you, she bakes stuff every Friday. She might have made extra-”   


“You’re _defending_ her, Nick,” Julia responds airily. “But she’s just your roommate, right? You wouldn’t sleep with her.” The last three words are a challenge.   
  
“There’s actually a legal document preventing that from happening,” Nick bites back. He rummages in a drawer in his desk, and throws the No-Nail Oath at the bed; it flutters to rest beside her, and she snatches it up, turning onto her stomach, instantly intrigued. By the time she finishes laughing her way through it, she has two hickies, one on each hipbone, and Jess is forgotten.

 

\---

 

The following Saturday, Jess goes running by, wearing tiny shorts and a sweater; she brushes up against him in her haste.  
  
“Woah! There she is,” Nick calls, ambling into the kitchen. He smiles at her lady-friends, seated around the table.   
  
“Nick, where is this bitch?” Cece says darkly. “I’m gonna smack that lawyer-learnin’ right outta her mouth.” She sets her jaw.

 

Nick opens the fridge, looking for creamer. He opts for a beer. Screw the coffee.  “This is getting excessive, you guys! She’s actually helping her get out of a ticket.”  
  
“By being condescending and judgemental?” Sadie asks.   
  
“What did she say?” Nick demands.   
  
“Look, just drop it, Nick.” Jess comes back in and jams her ribbon hat down on Cece’s head.   


“Okay, what did Julia do wrong?” he yells.   
  
“It’s just how girls fight sometimes. There’s a lot unsaid,” Jess answers, spreading out her hands. “Like one time a girl said to me, ‘Jess, you rock a lot of polka dots.’”   
  
The other women agree this was a deeply offensive thing to say. Nick doesn’t understand any of it. Schmidt slips through, still complaining about wet towels. Nick wishes his problems were as simple as some moist cotton.   
  
“You know what, Jess? Julia is one of those girls where she doesn’t have like, a lot of girlfriends, because she thinks like a guy! She doesn’t play mind games.”   


“So blind!” Jess declares.   
  
“Look, all I know is she’s totally upfront with me. No subtext, no codes.” Nick thinks that’s pretty nice, considering Caroline communicated completely in codes, written in subtext.   
  
“Okay, so did she come right out and ask if you were seeing other girls?” She looks up and away. “Because… she asked me.” She pokes herself with her thumb.   
  
He’s stunned. “She did?!” The others look at him with validation.   
  
“You didn’t know that?” Jess asks, sarcastically. He frowns. “Cause I thought you guys were so upfront with one another. I thought you guys told each other everything.”   
  
“Yeah,” Cece agrees.   
  
“She told him she didn’t wanna “label it”,” she continues, using air quotes.   
  
“I mean, that’s a classic move, even in the lesbian community,” Sadie says. Schmidt appears, and the conversation turns away from the fight.   
  
\---

 

That evening, it comes back up, though at least now Nick has the bar between him and Jess’ questioning, and it’s just the two of them. She doesn’t have her backup logic singers.

 

“Why can’t you just admit that she’s your girlfriend?” Jess asks. Nick leans down on the bar and closer to her. “I dunno, I just thought it was uncomplicated, and now I’m freakin’ out. I’m not good at being a boyfriend. I’m good at being that guy that you find yourself spending more and more time with until you meet your husband.”   
  
Jess gestures with her hands, dangerously close to her glass of pink wine. “Okay, so so far, Nick Miller’s list of fears is sharks, tap water, and real relationships,” she teases.   


“And blueberries,” he agrees. One of the patrons calls out “BARKEEP!”, so he stands up, but it’s just Schmidt. “Get this man a drink!” he calls, gesturing to Winston, who is just now realizing he doesn’t have game and it’s always been about basketball.

 

Somehow, this turns to a conversation about how Nick gets girls, because he has “nothing”, which is ridiculous, of course Nick has stuff, he is pretty smart, and still has all his hair, and he can make drinks, and he’s a good listener, and is very giving in bed, so yeah, he has stuff. Just not, like, a fancy car or clothes, or money.

 

“You’re right, I’ve got nothing!” he yells softly; Jess grins. “Except this!” He tosses a bottle of Grey Goose around clumsily. It looks a lot easier on YouTube, to be fair. He drops it, it shatters, and Jess hides her face in her hands, murmuring “ohmygod.”

 

Julia makes an entrance at that moment, and he flags her down. Jess leans in again. “Ooh, you guys are using names? That’s not too labelly for you?” He closes his eyes and his roommates clear off for their booth, leaving a spot for his sort-of-girlfriend.

 

“Hey, thought I’d drop by and say hello,” she says.   
  
“I didn’t know we were doing drop bys,” Nick answers. “Look, why do you have such a problem with my friend Jess?”   


“I don’t have a problem with her,” Julia says innocently. “How was your day?”  
  
“Fine, it was fine. Look, Jess told me what you asked her yesterday. That you asked if I was sleeping with other people,” he questions.   


It turns out that Julia is sleeping around. She’s low-key like one of Schmidt’s hookup crew people.   
  
Nick is too old fashioned, is what it probably comes down to. He doesn’t sleep with more than one person at a time, if he hangs around a girl more than one or twice, he feels obligated to be loyal to them, and this whole modern-dating-screw-three-people-per-weekend-no-strings-attached thing is just… weird. He doesn’t want to be a possessive caveman, but some distant part of his brain shouts faintly that he needs more...connection...to really be happy with someone.

 

In one of his less proud moments, he sneers that of course he’s also having sex with other people, he’s having sex right now, and she’s on top, under the bar, so figure that out.

 

That’s what happens when you don’t put fucking labels on things. The nice thing about labels? _They make things easy to read_. Julia’s eyes are pretty easy to read when she turns tail and runs for the bathroom; she’s about to cry.

 

And so is Nick.

 

He sighs and closes his eyes.

 

\---

 

He looks up from rubbing the tears from his eyes when the men’s room door and Jess is there; their eyes meet, and she’s also about to cry for some reason.

 

“What are you doing, Jess, get out!” he hollers; she scampers away.

 

\---

 

A couple days later, Nick comes home from the park and finds Julia in a nest of ladies: Jess, Cece, and Sadie, all knitting things. She asks to speak to him alone as soon as she looks up at him.  
  
Julia’s hair is all loose and wavy around her shoulders; her big dark eyes are serious. “There’s something I really need to say to you,” she says. Figuring he’s about to get dumped, Nick responds in a gravelly tone, “All right, then go ahead.” He closes his eyes and grimaces.   


“I’m gonna, I-”  


“Just say it,” he intones. She leans closer to him. “I, I wanted to say that, I don’t want to date anyone else, I just wanna date you,” she says quickly.

 

His puzzled expression changes to a warm smile. “Well, that’s what I was gonna say to you,” he says affectionately. Her face lights up. “Really?”  


“Yeah,” he grins back.   
  
“So then-” she bites her lip-”so then, you’re like, my _boy_ friend now?” She says jokingly. They work out the semantics until she leans in and kisses him deeply; she wraps herself around him.   


Also, it turns out that he and Schmidt have been sharing a towel, which is why it is always damp, making the towel rods a totally unnecessary addition to the bathroom.  And apparently sharing underpants is weird, which really casts Nick’s childhood into a whole new light, but whatever.

 

\-----

 

He and Jess are going to Costco, and Nick is driving, when he and another driver get into an argument over a space.

 

“This isn’t Europe! Move!” he yells at the older guy in the big green and white truck.  
  
“Come on, Nick, maybe he’s a really nice guy that’s just having a bad day,” Jess says kindly. Nick turns to her.   
  
“I don’t care if he’s a nice guy!” he cries, as the other guy revs his engine. “Get that piece of crap out of my space!” the other man yells, gesturing rudely.   
  
“Come on, dude, why don’t you come in here, and-”   


“Nick,” Jess says warningly. He ignores her. “Take my pants off, and kiss. My. ASS-” Nick shouts back, and the other guy pulls a freakin’ GUN out of his pocket and lays it on his dashboard.   
  
“Ohhh!” Nick yells, diving over to cover Jess as they both crawl down under the dash.   
  
“HUH? WHAT ARE YOU GONNA SAY NOW? HUH?” The crazy man trumpets.   
  
“Oh my God, he has a gun!” “It’s like the Wire!” “Stay down!” They huddle together and Nick asks, “Do you still think he’s a nice guy, Jess?”   
  
“Maybe no one’s ever been nice to him, maybe violence is his only tool for expressing himself!” she argues compassionately. She sits up and Nick reaches across the seat, slipping a hand behind her back and trying to push her back down as she smiles like a Japanese game show contestant and apologizes. He tries all kinds of things, pulling her wrists, shoulders, and hands down, trying to get her to duck back down with him. When that fails, he gives in. “Please don’t kill us, take the spot!” Nick shouts. “Act submissive,” he says to Jess. She mimes an apology.   


“Don’t apologize! I’m overreacting?! He has a gun and you’re dressed like a bullseye!” The other driver throws his hands up like Jess and reverses out of the way, letting them have it. “I can’t believe this is working,” Nick mutters. “You out-crazy’d a man with a gun,” he says wonderingly.  
  
“See? It worked. You always see the worst in people,” Jess chides.   


“Because people are the worst,” he answers, pulling into the spot and parking the car. They get out with Jess’ list in hand.  
  
“I have to make a quick trip to the pharmacy and the lady aisle- Schmidt threw out all my hidden tampons-”   


“You hid one in your _apron_ , Jess.”   


“You never know when you have to stop a big gush of blood in the kitchen! It was practical, really.”  


\---

 

Jess forgot her teacher-cart in her room, so they head back up to the loft to grab it before bringing their purchases up in one load.  
  
“You’re always starting fights with everyone, Nick,” Jess says as they walk in. Her short black skirt flutters along and shows him little slivers of thigh every time she steps forward. It’s a nice view. “I mean, not everyone’s out to get you!”   
  
He tosses his hoodie on the couch and responds, “He had a gun, Jess! He was literally out to get me.” He follows her into the kitchen. She leans against the counter and so does he.   


“Isn’t Nick the most negative person you’ve ever met?” Nick tries to smile charmingly back at Winston and Schmidt; Schmidt instantly agrees. “And you know what? It all pools up right in that little sadness center right below his belly button.”  
  
She turns and grabs a coffee cup as Winston continues, “He’s not wrong, though. His life is genuinely terrible.”   
  
“You know what, Jess?” Nick answers, ignoring the other two clowns for now. “I guess I don’t live in a world where I smile and people do what I want them to do.” She turns on the water to fill her mug. “You never smile,” she says dismissively. “Smiling is a sign of weakness,” he counters, and she screams. The garbage disposal has activated and scared her, again. He pushes off the counter with a sigh and goes for the disposal stick. “All right, everybody relax,” Nick says wearily.   


He turns off the water and jabs the garbage disposal into submission as Jess stands clear and the other guys nonchalantly finish their breakfast. “And get out!” he yells, as the thing stops making noise. “It’s fixed,” he adds breezily as he carries the stick back to its place on top of the shelf at the edge of the kitchen.  
  
“Okay, Nick, I’m calling the landlord, this is ridiculous-” Jess says, and the guys all jump into action with negative cries. “Don’t call the landlord, we don’t need him here and he’s a jerk,” Nick says definitively. Jess thinks this is another situation she can smooth out, but the other guys agree with him, for once, and he says seriously, “Don’t call the landlord, _I’m serious_ .” His eyes even bug out a little with sincerity.   


“Okay,” she says, too easily.  
  
\---

 

Later on that day, she comes rushing in, and Nick knows as soon as she walks in what she’s done.   
  
“Hey guys, I have a fun exercise. I’d like everyone to take a moment and think back to a time when they did something stupid, and how they were treated, and how they wish they were treated-”   
  
“What did you do, Jess?” Nick asks.   


There’s a knock, and a shouted “OPEN UP!”  


“Did you talk to the landlord?” he demands.  


“A little bit,” she says apologetically.  
  
“Okay, it’s happening!” Schmidt jumps up, and all the guys scurry into action. “Call me Jimmy!” he yells, running into the little bedroom. Nick tells her to open the balcony doors, flipping the mattress on its side and pushing it hurriedly onto the balcony. He throws pants after her as “Jimmy” carries in another armful of clothes. “I told you we didn’t practice this enough!” Nick cries. They’d come up with the Jimmy manuever when they decided to rent out the fourth closet-bedroom they’d created, before Jess came.   


The landlord comes in, nodding at Nick and Winston. “Brad, Coach,” he greets them formally.

 

Jess and Schmidt come running into the living room, pulling a large suitcase.  
  
“Hello, I have such nice time visiting Los Angeles!” he says in a terrible, unidentifiable accent. “It’s so many fancy people with the fancy lights! Hollywood!” “Brad” claps him on the shoulder and gives him a European kiss-cheek goodbye.   
  
“Oh, Jimmy. We love him, we’re gonna miss him,” Nick says as he slams the door and they all look expectantly at the landlord.   
  
“So someone told me you have four people living here,” he says.   
  
“Well that idiot probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Nick growls back. The landlord stomps into Schmidt’s room, which is barren, aside from a knocked-over chair. “Who left the library like this?” Nick asks dramatically.   
  
He declares that the sex wall has to be painted over, but that he was expecting a lot worse and that four people is fine as long as they leave him alone. So naturally Jess has to try and ruin it by pushing his buttons.   


“Sir, wait!” she calls, as Nick says “Let him go.”  
  
It turns out the landlord’s name is Remy, and her big sad baby blues work on him, too. He agrees to fix some stuff around the loft that Nick has either already repaired (and fancy fixed too!) or stuff he hasn’t gotten around to, yet, like Jess’ closet door.

 

Nick walks into her room to see Remy curved up behind her, bracing against the floor as they both tug at the stuck door. Something protective and territorial flares in his belly.  
  
“Okay, that will do it,” he says gravely. They both stop and turn to face him. “Hey Jess, can I talk to you for a minute alone?”   
  
They walk into the kitchen, out of earshot. “Ready to admit you’re wrong?” she asks smugly. “Hello, my name is Nick, and I like eating crow.”   
  
“That man wants to sleep with you,” he says darkly.

 

Her face is shocked and dismayed. “No, he doesn’t!” “Yes, he does,” Nick argues.  
  
“He was just showing me how to close the-”   
  
“Okay, any time a man shows a woman how to do something from behind, it’s just an excuse for him to get really close and breathe on her neck, watch any sports movie,” he says emphatically.   


“That is not a thing!” she snipes back.  
  
Time for a lesson. “Mind picking up that mug?” he asks casually. She turns and grabs it, looking at him sideways like a lizard with a bug in its mouth.   
“Nah, nah, you’re doing it all wrong,” Nick says, dropping his voice down a sexy octave. He walks around her, touching her upper arm and circling behind her. “Here, let me show ya.” She makes a nervous half-giggle. “No, I’ve been doing this for years.” He fits himself around her, tucking his chin over her shoulder and pressing the length of his front down her body, arms coming up to guide hers. “The way to pick up a mug is like that, you just gotta-”   
  
She stiffens and flails out of his too-close embrace, which didn’t totally highlight the fact that their hips were exactly the same height or that the curve of her ass and his groin clicked together like Legos. She rounds on him, leaning in to whisper-yell. “He wasn’t doing that!”   
  
“That’s exactly what he was doing!” Nick answers. “You always see the worst in people!” she says again, so he repeats back, “Because people are the worst.” He tells her how he found $5 as a kid and some grown ass man pushed him into the bushes and stole it. “You must have been doing something,” she responds. “People can be good, you just have to give them a chance to show you.” She recalls a time when a creep in a van gave her tons of candy and didn’t abduct, rape, and murder her. In the middle of her impassioned speech, Remy walks in, comments that her room smells like a real man, and queries after when they are gonna start on “that bed”. Nick stares at her incredulously.

 

“He’s turning my mattress!” she laughs.  
  
“Yeah,” Nick softly mutters, sarcastically.   
  
\---

 

Later, Cece, Winston, and Nick are laughing over one of Schmidt’s old New Year’s Resolution lists, completely at Schmidt’s expense, of course. Jess and Remy come in, and she announces she’s going to make him dinner as thanks for all the things he’s done around the apartment. They all demurr.  


“So I guess it’ll just be me and Jess,” Remy says, and Nick instantly changes his mind. “Oh no, Remy. I changed my mind, I’ll be there,” he promises, cracking his knuckles. “Just watchin’ ya.”  
  
\---

 

Jess changes into a pretty dress with black lace and ivory bits. She’s prepared some pasta and a salad, a really nice spread. “Remy brought a bottle of-” she starts brightly, holding the green glass vessel up. “This,” she finishes, looking at Nick.  
  
“I ferment things in the basement,” Remy says thoughtfully. “I also make cheese.” He’s changed into a terrible shirt with twelve or fifteen patterns scattered across it. It makes Nick’s eyes bleed.   
  
“You’re not drinking that, Jess,” Nick says seriously. She smiles tightly. “Yes I am, Remy made it.” She takes a swig and spits it out over her shoulder in a spray. “Ugghahh,” she groans.   
“Think you can handle some, Nick?” Remy asks. He covers his empty glass with his hand. “No, I’m okay. Somebody needs to stay sober to fight you later,” Nick says dangerously, looking at Jess.   
  
“Nick, be nice. How hard could it be to just open yourself up a little bit? Dip your toe in the pool of possibilities!” She is trying so hard to win this argument with him.   
  
Remy is oblivious. “Yeah, Nick, dip your toe,” he says. Disgust rolls over Nick’s features.   


“You guys have a lot in common!” Jess says cheerfully. “Nick went through a breakup last year that was really hard on him.” He looks at her wildly. “Schmidt said your mom had to fly out.”  


“That was a scheduled trip!” he says. Remy relates that he slept in the sheets where his wife had been, crying and sweating until they lost her scent. And yeah… Nick’s done that. Maybe it’s the blinding smell of what is probably rubbing alcohol, but he can relate a bit to that. He lets Remy sideways-hug him.

 

\--

 

Remy drinks most of the bottle of his fermented creation, and Nick sneaks water into a wine glass while Jess takes some apple juice in hers. They end up on the couch, Remy on one end, Nick back in the corner, and Jess close beside him, her knees touching his, leaning across him when she addresses Remy. They all giggle fondly.  
  
“Oh man, tonight has been- I honestly didn’t know if I could enjoy myself again,” Remy says. He toasts them. “So, thanks.” He clears his throat. “Bathroom break!”   


As soon as he leaves the room, Jess scoots even closer, and Nick leans up to her.  “See? I was right,” she whispers, her eyes fever-bright. “What do you mean, you’re right?” he whisper-demands back. He can smell her flowery perfume. “You’re wrong!”  


“You see the way he’s buttering me up so he can move in on you?” he snaps. “Why can’t you just admit that you were wrong?” “How have you lived this long on your own?” he wonders. Jess has no survival instinct whatsoever. “There’s no part of that man that wants to sleep with me!” she says happily. “He’s been creeping on you all night!” Nick argues back.

 

“No, he hasn’t been!” she replies. “Open your eyes! I’m worried about-” Nick falls silent when he hears Remy’s footsteps. He’s standing before them in his horrible shirt and boxers.  
  
“Ooo..” Nick says gutturally; Jess turns to witness it.   
  
“Hey Remy, what happened to your pants?” The man reaches into the slit of his boxers and moves his junk. “I’ve never done a threesome,” he says a little nervously. “That’s what we’re doing here, right?”   
  
“This I did not expect,” Nick says. Jess has fallen silent.   


“Let’s move this to the bedroom, shall we?” Remy replies, heading off. They follow him, gob-smacked.

 

\--

 

Nick is vindicated on so many levels.  
  
For one, someone else has noticed all the sexual tension between him and Jess, someone who doesn’t know them and until about three hours ago thought his name was Brad. For two, Jess finally will have to admit she’s wrong. And for three, well…

 

They’re standing outside Jess’ closed bedroom door.  
  
“I love watching you be wrong, Jess,” he says triumphantly.   
  
“I might have been a little bit off about Remy, but people are generally good, and I am not wrong about that,” she replies. He leans down toward her. “Jess, people are jerks,” Nick answers truthfully. “He is hurting from his divorce-”   
  
“Are you still making excuses for this guy?” Nick demands. “Well look, if you feel so bad, then just get in there!” He motions to the bedroom. Her eyes are huge and she’s mute in response.   
  
“Just dip your toe in the pool of possibility!” he mocks. He pops the door open; their landlord is doing pre-sex stretches on the edge of the bed. “Hey Remy, let’s get weird and toss that ball around, huh?” he calls in. Jess’ eyes get twice their original size and she dips over, pulling her bedroom door shut again quickly.   
  
“So turned on,” Nick says sarcastically.   
  
“Okay so you would seriously have a threesome with that man just to get me to admit that I’m wrong?” she questions.   
  
“Oh, I think we could do a lot worse than Remy. He has strong arms,” Nick replies. She stares him down, then reaches down and pulls off her flats in a threatening manner. “Let’s have a threesome,” she says, in her old-timey newscaster voice of sexytime. It’s pretty strained.   


She disappears into the bedroom, leaving Nick leaning against the doorframe. He groans and scrubs his face with his palm.

 

This was going way, way off the rails. Julia aside, he wasn’t going to ruin his first time sleeping with Jess by having some weird sweaty glorified janitor all up in her business.

 

(Wait, _what_ ?)   


He slaps some sense into himself by tapping each of his cheeks in turn. Time to end this.

 

\---

 

“All right, so a ménage à trois is about the three of us,” Remy triangulates between them pointlessly, “Trois, ménaging, fully.”  
  
“Oui,” Jess says. “Okay,” Nick agrees. “This is happening,” his tone is horrified; “With this guy,” he points to Remy. He points to him. “This is happening right now, Jess.”   
  
“Yeah,” she gulps, nodding. 

This is one of the first times one of their arguments becomes a challenge with a sexual undercurrent, but it's far from the last time.  
  
“So this is gonna get a little bit even more uncomfortable,” Remy says encouragingly; they both shrink back with frightened looks. “We just have to keep communicating. Let’s get some relaxing music on,” Remy adds; when he turns, Nick and Jess have a frenzied, panicked conversation, speaking over one another in soft whispers. “We are about to have a ménage à trois with this man because you can’t admit you’re wrong!”   
  
They dance around to 'Send Me on My Way'. “Say it’s over and it’s over Jess,” Nick says pleadingly as Remy starts to massage his shoulders; Nick squirms away. “Stop this, stop it right now!” he mouths as Remy tries to soothe him. He wraps around Nick like a lonely octopus with a drinking problem.

  
“You’re gonna be the underpants captain tonight, Nick.”   
  
“Good choice, Remy. Nick will make a fantastic underpants captain!” Jess says enthusiastically.   
  
“Okay, you two get us started,” Remy says, putting Nick and Jess’ hands on each other’s shoulders. “Me and Jess get it started?” Nick asks strangely. 

“Yeah,” Remy agrees. “Us two, gettin’ it started,” Jess says lowly. “You know what to do, breathe into it,” their landlord advises. They start to dance awkwardly. “I’m not here.”  
  
“Just relax into the ménage,” Nick says sarcastically, his arms entwined with Jess’.   
  
“Let’s get this started, Nick,” she says crossly. “Are we doing this, Jess?” he says incredulously. “Cause I would, I will do it,” he warns. They are dancing on such unstable territory, here.   
  
“Yes, I am. I will do this,” she replies.   
  
“Then let’s do this,” Nick snaps back. 

“Nick, I will do this,” Jess says again. She rubs at his collarbone through his shirt.  
  
“Admit that you’re wrong and it's over,” he says.

“I’m not wrong!” she insists.  
  
“Jess, you can’t do this, but I can,” Nick says smugly. If it comes to it, he can blame his dingdong and chickadees.   


“Okay. Let’s do this, Nick,” she says back, woodenly, steel in her voice.

“Then let’s do it, Jess,” Nick says finally, bringing his hands up to cup her face and leaning in to kiss her.

He’s a fraction of an inch from her lips- he can feel the warmth of her face- when she chickens out at last and pulls back.   
  
“No! Okay, fine!” She pushes Nick back off her by the shoulders. “I admit it, I’m wrong!”   
  
“YES!” Nick says triumphantly, throwing his fists in the air. He high-fives the flabbergasted Remy, who is just staring at them blankly.

 Winston intervenes, they kick Remy out, and then settle around the kitchen, dipping into the fermented stuff in the green bottle.  
  
“To be honest, I’m kind of riding a weird ego high,” Nick admits. His oldest friend bails out, leaving him alone with Jess.  
  
“Why didn’t you tell me four people couldn’t live in this apartment?” she asks. “If we’re gonna do a shenanigan, I’m fine with doing shenanigans. I love shenanigans.” She’s sunk real low onto the table. “As long as no one gets hurt-”  
  
Winston reappears, using a plastic spatula to flip one of the dangerous switches; Nick and Jess jump and she shrieks as it sparks out over their heads.  


“Okay, just so we’re clear, we’re gonna have to live with this, right?” Winston asks.  
  
“Yup,” Jess replies.   
  
“Absolutely,” Nick affirms.   


\---

 

The next day, they’re both nursing hangovers from the terrible basement concoction.

“Do you wanna go see that new Julia Roberts movie?” she asks, nibbling on a cookie. He grabs one from the plate beside her on the couch.  
  
“Is Schmidt around?” Nick asks.   
  
“No, he went into work early.”

“Winston?”

“No idea, but I haven’t seen him around.”  
  
“Okay, well, if either one of them is in earshot, no. But secretly: yes, I really want to go see _Moonlight in Rhodesia_ , okay? Let’s go.”   


“Awesome, I’ll look up showtimes!” she says happily.  


“But if they ask, you dragged me!” Nick calls as he heads off to get dressed for their outing.  
  
They run into Remy in the elevator.   


“My door is always open,” he says, invitingly.  
  
They turn to each other with equally traumatized faces.   


\---

 

Sleeping Nick has a dream that night.  
  
They giggled most of the way through _Moonlight in Rhodesia_ like two old clucky hens. It was just the right amount of rom-com corny. Naturally, the guy fell in love with Julia Roberts the second he saw her. Of course, they had a breakup in the rain. And then they inevitably reunited just as she was in the moving truck, leaving the town they’d lived in together.   


They split drinks at the bar, then he meets up with Julia, they go back to her place, and that’s the really bad part, is he has the dream while in bed with his girlfriend, the girlfriend he just gave that label to.

Remy is dancing to the side of him; he looks over and there’s Jess. She’s not wearing the black and cream dress which is how he knows it’s a dream; she’s wearing a red dress. She shouldn’t be allowed to wear red around him because it does something to him every time she does.

“God, Miller, when are you finally gonna just snap and kiss me?” Dream Jess shouts.

“Fine, I’ll do it, c'mere,” Sleeping Nick says, then grabs her head the same way, and tilts his face, and their lips crash together like the sun and the moon colliding. Sparks fly and icebergs melt and the polar ice caps are threatened. Everything falls away except the feelings of her surging up to meet him with an equal amount of passion; her fingers slide up through his hair and she hooks one of her calves around his knees, and they almost buckle with the intensity that burns through the kiss. She pushes him down onto her bed, and he feels something else tickling at his foot, but he kicks it away; distantly he realizes it’s Remy, trying to take off his sock. When he starts to pull at the zipper to Jess’ dress, he scoops her into his arms and carries her across the hallway to his room, her eyes huge. He kicks the door shut behind them and the zipper of her dress rips off with how forcefully Nick pulls it down. Jess is trying to pull it off at the same time, so the garment ends up in tatters on the ground, and when she spins around, she’s wearing a blue lace bra he’s seen hanging up in the laundry room, all floral and delicate. Before he has time to even admire her breasts, she’s reaching back and freeing them; he pulls his shirt over his head, and starts to kiss her neck, when-

 

“Nick,” she says.  


“Shhh, no talking, more kissing,” Sleeping Nick says.

 

“NICK!”  

He awakens with a jolt; Julia is standing over him, a no-nonsense white bathrobe covering her.  
  
“You kicked my cat!” she says angrily when he sits up.   
  
‘What?” he asks blearily.  
  
“My cat was at the foot of the bed, and you kicked him- hard!” she says. She reaches down and picks up the offended feline; he sniffs at Nick, hisses, and claws his way free of its mistress, taking off into the hallway.

 

“I’m sorry, he must have tickled me,” he says apologetically. Even though he doesn’t like cats. 

“He likes to take people’s socks off,” she acknowledges, dropping the robe and crawling back into bed. She raises her hands out of bed and claps twice, and the lights shut off.  
  
“You have a Clapper?” Nick laughs.   
  
“Yeah, it was my nana’s, I like to use it to feel closer to her.”   
  
So naturally, Nick uses it three more times before he is bored enough to fall back asleep.

  
  



	6. Valentine's Day Bully.

**Chapter Six.**  
  
Valentine’s Day Bully.

  


It’s Nick’s first Valentine’s Day with Julia (...and Jess) so he’s going to go all out. Julia seems surprised by this.

They’re lounging around his room, where they spend most of their time, these days, it feels like.

“So we’re doing this, full-on Valentine's,” Julia says, case notes in her hands. “What did you do last year?”  
  
“Well, I was fighting with Caroline,” he replies. He lets his leg bounce back and forth casually. The dress she’s got on is really clingy. He likes it… a lot. 

“What were you fighting about?”  
  
“Oh, you know, the usual… about how I make too much money, and I dress too fancy, and I’m too good at communicating my feelings,” he says sardonically.

 

“Right,” she sighs sarcastically and playfully rolls her eyes.  
  
“Well this year we’re gonna make up for it.” He’s worked some extra long shifts at the bar to build up a little nest egg of money to blow tonight. “You and me are gonna do a real Valentine’s Day date.” She comes and sits next to him on the bed and whispers, “I know, god… what’s the plan?” She looks genuinely excited.

 

“Well, first of all, you’re gonna need a map of Arizona,” he begins.

 

“I can get that,” she replies.

 

“And a container you’re comfortable getting urine in,” he continues.

 

“Oh, I have one in my purse!” she says goofily. “You do?” Nick says, a bit disgustedly, her peal of laughter makes him crack up too.

 

“Are you taking me scorpion hunting in the desert?” she asks seriously.  


“Classic Nick Miller thirteenth date!” he says brightly.

 

“We’ve had more than thirteen dates, surely,” Julia answers.

 

“I dunno,” Nick ponders. “Anyway, I’ll pick you up at 7?”  
  
“Sounds perfect,” she says, leaning down to kiss him. “See you then.”   
  
\---

 

He leaves early so that he gets to her firm by 6:45. The mail boy stops him and assumes he’s a package delivery guy, which would be funny, since he is kind of delivering his package, to Julia, but it’s also insulting because can’t a boyfriend come see his hard-working lawyer girlfriend after work on a Hallmark holiday?

 

The creepy mail guy also wants to nail Julia. He explains this in graphic detail. Nick can only frown in disgust.

 

It turns out that the little creep is actually not the mail guy at all, but Julia’s intern, Cliff.

 

“Hey Cliff,” he says sarcastically after Julia introduces him as her boyfriend and kisses him hello.

 

She bought him a bunch of cheesy Valentine’s Day things, like heart boxers. He pulls them on over his jeans.

 

She puts on a light up heart headband. “You were born to wear that thing,” he says affectionately.

“I just have a little bit more work to do, just like, an hour,” she says apologetically. He gets it; if he hadn’t fucked up, he might be right here beside her, burning the midnight candles.

 

\---

 

An hour and fifteen minutes later, he’s bored out of his skull, his phone is about to die, and he knows Cliff’s Cliff Notes, including the fact that Cliff plans on writing an autobiography and calling it Cliff Notes.

 

His future as a lawyer means he’s undeterred by threats of potential copyright infringement. He and Nick talk about that for a while, too.

 

Nick pops the top off the champagne he’d been saving for after the restaurant because it’s getting warm and there’s no ice to be found. Julia will have to drive them to the restaurant.

 

She walks by yelling into her phone, then tenderly melts when she sees the champagne. She kisses him sweetly.

 

“I pushed the reservation to 8:30,” he whispers.  
  
“I just need like 45 or 50 more minutes,” she promises. “I’m sorry!” Then Julia goes right back into bulldog lawyer mode on the phone.

 

Ever the gentleman, Nick fields an insecure phone call from Winston, deflects Cliff’s curiosity about his sex life with Julia, and even gives the guy a flute of champagne.

 

\--

 

Two flutes down, Nick is starting to see that the evening isn’t going to turn out the way he’d hoped.

 

He refills the glasses again. “You know what, Cliff? I’m sorry, I’m just feeling very romantic and I have nowhere else to put it, so happy Valentine’s day, good lookin’,” he says, a little drunkenly.

 

Cliff accepts the romance and asks how Nick got so far into law school before dropping out.

 

“Well, I got my heart broken, and then everything got weird,” he confides. “I started playing guitar in an alt-country ska band, gambling a lot; there was a really weird week where I wore a long blonde wig and I made everyone call me Sandy Ferguson.” It was, indeed, a weird week.

 

“I have never loved anyone that much,” Cliff says, awestruck.

 

“Then I drove to Mexico and tried to enter a cockfight.”  
  
“As a… person?”   


“Yes, Cliff, as a person.” He couldn’t let a chicken take the blows; he had to earn it like a man, like Hemmingway would. Hemingway didn’t let the bulls run at each other; he ran with them. He didn’t find any bulls, but Nick did find roosters, which had spurs, kinda like chicken leg-horns.

 

“The point of the story is, I looked around my life and I realized I didn’t want to work for somebody else my whole life,” Nick declares.

 

“That is exactly how I feel, man,” Cliff replies. He’s a little drunk too, and Cliff’s an emotional drunk.

 

“Yeah, but the second half of that story is how I went broke and started working for somebody else my whole life,” he concludes.

 

Cliff throws down his flute. Luckily, it’s plastic, since they don’t sell glass champagne flutes at Nick’s favorite Korean dollar store. He changes his mind about being a lawyer, which just proves he wasn’t listening at all to what Nick was saying. He quits and finds his Southern accent again, and runs off to spend time with his birds.

Nick’s ruined things, again. But then again, they were already kind of broken.

 

He admits he wasn’t going to tell her about the Mexico story until after she was already knocked up and stuck with him, which is telling of how drunk he is. She tells him to go home, and he calls a cab.

 

Same holiday, different year. Same day. Same sadness.

 

Worst. Holiday. Ever.

 

He’s halfway down the hallway when a little voice in his head tells him to be a boyfriend.

 

He’s been an intern.

 

He knows what to do.

 

\--

 

When Julia comes back in another hour later, the files are copied and sorted into boxes (probably) correctly, and labeled. Boom, bitches.

 

He gets a few deep kisses of appreciation before her phone goes off again. She sends him home, for real this time.

 

\--

 

Nick gets in late, but just in time to avoid complete and utter disaster.

 

Because for some ungodly reason, Jessica Day is standing outside Schmidt’s door, looking more like Jessica Night, because she has Cece-esque dark makeup all around her eyes, and all black on, with tiny shorts and heeled boots and a clingy top, and basically she looks like sex on a stick. And she is about to knock on SCHMIDT’S door. Evidently, her plan to get a one night stand had failed _(no surprise there, Jess is not a one-night stand type of girl, she’s the kind of girl you mar-...his brain quickly ends that thought)_ so she seems to think his college roommate is some kind of Plan B.

 

She drops the biggest box of condoms Nick has ever seen and they scatter everywhere. She looks up at him guiltily. He gapes at her.

 

“I was asking Schmidt a question,” she lies quickly.

 

“Woah, woah, woah...were YOU-” he points at Schmidt’s door.

 

“No,” she says firmly.

 

“With SCHMIDT?” he whisper-yells.

 

“No! No.”

 

Nick gasps in horror and his eyes bug out. Of course, nothing would have happened, because of the Oath, but she didn’t know that! She was about to crawl into Schmidt’s room, looking to- fornicate!

 

“I was holding those, but, I-” she dives to the ground and starts scooping up the rainbow of prophylactics off the hardwood. Nick bends down to help her.

 

“Oh my God, what has gotten into you?!” he demands. “And why do you have so many condoms!?”  


“Don’t ask- shh. Don’t ever speak of this again!” she cries, scooping up more condoms and stuffing them in the box.

 

“You need one!” he scolds, then comes around her side and grasps her by the hips, lifting her up and carrying her away. “Come on!”  
  
“I was feeling twirly! Nick!” She goes limp in his arms like a rag doll.   
  
“No, you are not having sex with Schmidt! This is a danger zone!”   
  
“But I-”   
  
“But nothing!” He pulls her all the way back to the space between their bedroom doors and stands her up, spins her to face him.   


“Jess, have you had anything to drink tonight?” He puts his hands on her shoulders and peers down into her eyes; she blinks up at him.  
  
“No, not in like...five hours,” she says distantly.   


“Did someone spike your drink? Did you smell anything weird in the air? Did you notice any unmarked white vans? Maybe the EPA is testing some kind of mating pheromone on the general public.” He reaches down and pulls her hands up to his face, checking her veins for puncture marks. They’re clean and smell faintly like a perfume.

“Nobody drugged me, Nick. I just felt… twirly.”  
  
“Well then put on one of your pretty dresses and twirl away,” he says kindly. “I’ll put on Dirty Dancing.”   
  
“Dirty Dancing is for when you’re sad,” she says automatically. “And that’s- that’s not what twirly means.” Her voice drops lower with shame.   
  
“Then what does it mean, Jess?” His voice drops too.   


“It means… it means I’m, uh- well, I want-ugh. I would like to participate in sexual congress with-”  
  
“Twirly means you’re horny?” he demands.   
  
“If you insist on using that vile word, yes, I’m...horny.” She whispers the last word with her face buried in her hands.   


He breathes a sigh of relief. “Why didn’t you just say that, for cryin’ out loud?”  


“You don’t think that’s- weird? For a girl to admit that she just wants-”  
  
“You’re a human being, Jess. You’re allowed to want things, and desire people, and sometimes just want someone physically. That’s just a universal thing,” Nick says gently. “But do you really want- _that_ \- with _Schmidt_?”   
  
“Not really. I almost used a guy named Oliver as a meat puppet tonight,” she confesses.   
  
He grimaces at the phrase “meat puppet.”   
  
“I just wanted to get laid with no strings attached, and it’s not like I could ask you for that,” she says lowly.   
  
“Nah, of course not, I mean...”   
  
“You have Julia,” she supplies helpfully. “How was your night, by the way?”   


“Well, we didn’t go on our date, because she has a huge case that’s bordering on all-out trade war with China…” he explains.  
  
“I’m sorry, Nick.” She reaches out and squeezes his arm affectionately, then turns and lingers in her doorway. “Goodnight, Nick.”   
  
“Goodnight,” he says softly, as she closes her door.

 

\---

 

“Hey, Nick!” Jess calls out, a few days later. Julia’s gone to China to yell at people in person. “Schmidt slept with the same girl twice in a row! I owe you $5.” 

“You know, I thought I heard the door open at 3 am! Those are the sounds of true love,” Nick grins, padding into the kitchen in his pajama outfit. “I bet she had the time of her life.” He takes Schmidt’s coffee before he can take a sip, so he has to make another cup. Clown. That’s what he gets for wearing that indecently tiny kimono that was probably manufactured for a 12-year-old Japanese girl.

 

“What happened, did I miss her?” Winston asks. He loves meeting the girls Schmidt brings home so he can pretend to be Schmidt’s jaded lover. Nick takes a seat beside Jess with his stolen beverage. Schmidt insists he doesn’t show off his conquests, which is a straight up lie, because sometimes he literally sends them to Nick’s room so he can see them the next morning.

 

They joke about how she must be ugly, with dwarf parts or ginger hair, until Jess makes a Hitler joke. She tries.

 

\--

 

It’s a good day until the doorbell rings with a delivery from the internet; it’s a potted cactus, addressed to Nick. From Julia. So clearly, she’s passive-aggressively dumping him via spined plant life.

He gives the cactus a good, healthy drink of a gallon of water. There ya go, thirsty little harbinger of doom!

“Why are you watering a cactus?” Jess asks, sitting at the table.  
  
“Because I’m an idiot,” Nick responds. 

Jess thinks the coded cactus message is “totally stupid and insane”.

“Jess, you don’t get it.” Nick picks up the cactus and begins to carefully carry it toward the balcony. “This cactus is like, a symbol of my relationship with her.” The pot slips out of his hands, and the whole thing goes tumbling to the ground, where it shatters all over the hardwood floor.

“I’m not gonna quit on this,” he says resolutely. “I’m gonna get her back.”  
  
\---

 

After Jess gives him one of her empty decorative pots from her room (it had previously held glitter glue sticks), Nick carefully uses rods and masking tape to do surgery on the cactus. It will probably look alive when Julia comes back, which is all that matters.

 

Jess is busy telling them about a problem she’s having at school with a kid who is constantly being bullied. She decided to fix it, naturally, with a song.

 

“You think singing a song about a kid is gonna stop him from getting his ass kicked?” Nick asks skeptically.

 

“I know twelve-year-olds are vicious, vengeful creatures,” Jess replies. “Middle school girls literally scalp each other. I spent most of the sixth grade with a bald spot on my head.”  
  
Nick’s face contorts with horror. “What?” He and Winston exchange a look.   
  
She’s adamant that her music routine will save the bullied kiddo, though. The kids even videotaped her! Which means, of course, that now she’s gonna be on Youtube. The parody is completely at Jess’ expense, and she’s mortified as they watch it on Winston’s laptop.

 

It concludes with the Jess-bird pooping all over the desk while singing. It’s a pretty funny video, Nick is ashamed to admit.

 

Schmidt calls and tells them to look out at the crescent moon, which she and Winston both do, without really knowing why. Nick takes the opportunity to call Julia, and when she doesn’t answer, he leaves a few voicemails of varying degrees of desperation. He starts to drink after the second one; generously, he pours some on plant!Nick. Then he realizes there’s a time gap, and she is going to get them all at once, and well… now he’s probably definitely getting dumped, cactus or no cactus, because he’s a crazy person.

When Julia gets back on Wednesday, she takes a cab straight to the loft. She listened to all the voicemails. He gets dumped. He even tells her he’s way better with babies rather than plants, which doesn’t help his case- he still gets dumped.

... _But he was right about the cactus_.

 

\---

 

Getting dumped again in a year’s timeframe really doesn’t do good things for Nick’s mental health. He veers off into the falsely happy territory that signals he’s in way too deep, teetering on the void of a depression crater the size of Kansas. Just one little push and he will be wearing Julia’s forgotten sweatshirt and sobbing into pink Kleenex roses and drinking more heavily than usual.

 

He decides to go drink at the beach, and maybe run into the waves, and if Winston could come with him to hold his sandwich-bag wallet and guard the Frankenstein'd remains of the cactus, that’d be great. He’d invite Jess too, but she’s at work.

 

“Hey, do you want to come with me to the beach? Cause I feel great and ready to rock, but I really don’t want to be alone,” Nick says, smiling with all his teeth at his oldest friend. Winston looks suitably frightened and quickly gets off the phone. Evidently, Jess is having a crisis which requires Winston’s good scissors.

  


When they arrive at her school, Jess is wearing a cute plaid dress. She sadly decides that the good scissors are not good enough to fix the broken robot arm, which she snapped off the bratty bully’s science project in a move that was clearly influenced by Nick-like behaviors, which is nice. He wraps his arms around them and rests his head on Winny’s shoulder.  
  
“Do you guys wanna watch _The Piano_ later?” Nick asks seriously.

 

\---

 

The science fair starts at 8 pm; Nick and Winston help Jess carry all the projects to the gym and set them up on the tables. As parents and kids start to filter in, they browse all the projects, deciding most of them are awful.  


“What can old people do? Does it taste better with hot sauce?” Winston reads off some of the titles as Nick sidles up. “My friends!” he smiles big.

 

“Guess what I just learned? What’s inside of a pumpkin!” he laughs. Jess snorts in amusement, probably at the fact that he didn’t know what was inside a pumpkin before. (He’d assumed the mushy stuff they use to make the orange part of the pie. Apparently, it’s like, stringy seeds. Not a lot of fresh veggies in the Miller household, growing up.)

 

Nick wanders off to read some more, only returning when he hears a woman’s voice ring out, “I want her disciplined!”  
  
“NO! No!” he bellows from across the room. Jess shouldn’t be disciplined for breaking the bratty kid’s stupid robot arm. He walks over to the little circle around the smoking robot. “No, no. Why can’t we all just love each other?” he asks. He stands beside Jess to back her up. It’s nice that they match.   


“What are you doing?” she whispers, like he’s crazy. He is crazy. He left seven voicemails about the meaning of a gift cactus on his now ex-girlfriends' phone. He picks up a globe.  


“Want a science project? How about this as a science project: love is a myth, why is this Earth so big, and I am so small?” Nathaniel, the chunky ginger kid who was the bully girl’s original target, shoves Winston’s good scissors around in his mouth. Nick watches for a moment, then shakes his fist, globe balanced on the other palm. “So yay, Earth.” He looks at Jess. “Be optimistic. Learn. We’re all gonna die alone, so…”   
  
He can’t hold it together anymore; he sinks down and buries his face in the skirt of Jess’ dress, weeping. Probably giving the kids an inspiration for next year’s project: ‘Why is this grown man crying into our teacher’s thigh?” Jess pats his head and shoulders gingerly while her principal tells her sternly to be in her office at 9 am tomorrow.   


She lets him carry on for a couple minutes before she drops down beside him; he puts his arm around her shoulder and pulls her closer, which she allows a little hesitantly. He has alarmingly few boundaries when it comes to Jessica Day.

“Why did this happen to me again?” he sniffs.

“She wasn’t right for you,” she replies consolingly. “I know it sucks now, but at least you know she wasn’t compatible with your kind of weird.” He is acutely aware of how compatible their weirds are when she reaches over, pushes his hair back, and kisses him on the forehead briefly; he feels her lipgloss leave a print on his skin. “Come on,” she encourages, pulling him to his feet as she rises. “Let’s get you home.”  


“Good idea,” he mumbles sadly. The kids and their parents shuffle around them awkwardly.

 

\---

 

He takes a sick day from the bar to wallow in his sadness, and she’s gone most of the day. She comes home earlier than usual, knocks at his door, and brings in a plant in a cute pot. It isn’t a cactus.

 

“Hey,” she says sweetly, coming in and plopping down on the bed where’s he’s stretched out. “I got you a real plant.”  
  
He doesn’t tell her about the baby-plant connection since it seemed to scare Julia off.   
  
“I don’t want it, Jess, I’ll just kill it,” he grumbles. She smiles down at him.

 

“I know. You’re a plant killer.” She oozes acceptance. “And I write songs. We’re weirdos. But that’s who we are. And that’s fine. And you have a giant cactus needle sticking out of your face.”

 

Nick hadn’t noticed.

 

“What? Where is it?” He lifts his head off the pillow with alarm. “Can you get it out? Get it out!” She reaches over and plucks it quickly; he winces in pain.

 

“Let me put some ointment on it, follow me to the bathroom,” she says in her teacher's voice. He puts the plants on the floor as he gets up and follows her.

 

\---

 

Jess makes the bully sing a new song with her, and it might be worse than the bird one. She uses a bunch of fake accounts to give herself compliments to balance out the troll comments.

 

Later that night, he goes through and flags all the hateful things and upvotes all her fake compliments, and leaves one comment that just says, “Very nice.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to write some borrrrrring employee handbooks for work in the next couple of weeks, and train some people, so it may be a while before the next update. Stick with me and thanks as always for all the helpful comments!


	7. Injured.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So uh, fun fact about this chapter. I was about a third of the way into the “Injured” half when my mom told me that she and my dad went in for a routine check and basically what happens to Nick in this chapter happened to him, just as they were leaving the doctor said “wait” and pointed out a tiny lump on his face and biopsied it on the spot. Unfortunately for my dad, it is a really aggressive form of cancer. I, uh, haven’t been taking that too well, thus the delay in this chapter. It was really hard to write, considering the subject matter and ultimate resolution that Nick has. I’ll try to get back up to speed as best I can with updates but that’s what is going on in my life at the moment.

**chapter seven.** **  
**

Injured.

 

 

\--

 

It starts when Jess tackles Nick during a playful touch football game that Jess takes way too literally. She slams him into the ground with a force that suggests her bones are made of dragon-forged metals.

 

“Are you okay?” she cries. He is not okay. He bellows in pain.

 

The pain radiates from his spine like a thousand stabbing needles just above his ass. It is worse and more acute than a hundred back to back shifts at the bar. It makes the bile rise in his throat.

 

His friends all stare down at him; Jess is mumbling platitudes. Trying to muster some dignity, he tries to rise again, but the pain somehow deepens; he screams again. She kneels down beside him and asks in a honeyed voice: “What do you need?”  


“Not you. Please go far from me right now,” he winces. Partially because he’s afraid he’ll thrash out and hurt her inadvertently while writhing in pain, like a horse with a broken leg; partially because her presence is making him remember she was the one who caused him to topple to the ground like a poorly stacked set of dominos, and partially because he’s pretty sure he’s about to fart without meaning to and she’s all up in his end zone.

 

“I can taste my spine,” he gasps. “Why is no one helping me?” Jess spreads her arms wide and wraps one palm around his knee, the other over his shoulder. “Not you!” he bellows. “Not you!”

 

He staggers up and limps to the car.

 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks, following behind him with her arms out to catch him. He groans. “You’re walking like a Disney witch. Let me drive you to your doctor.”

 

He admits that like so many Americans these days, he has no doctor and no insurance because life sucks. He tries to make a dramatic exit but pilots his car right into Winston’s slightly newer Demolition Derby contender. Winston is now yelling. Nick lets Jess wrap her arm around him and act as a human crutch as they survey the damage.

 

“I’m taking you to see my friend. Get in my car.” Her eyes go all huge and crazy. “NOW!”

 

He can’t argue with her when that happens.

 

\--

 

The waiting room is filled with pregnant ladies and pictures of pregnant ladies walking thru fields, and in cityscapes, and a message board covered in baby pictures.

 

“Jess, is Sadie a gynecologist?” he asks in horror.

 

“No, she’s an OBGYN,” she answers primly.

 

When he tries to crawl and escape, growling that he doesn’t have a vagina, an old lady makes a gross joke and Jess decides to be the third person to yell at him today. She adds insult to literal injury by mentioning how he’s poor.

 

Jess helps him into the exam room and he puts himself onto the table, smushing his face into the headrest where the pretty ladies put their hair. It makes the pain lower on the scale by about two points.

 

Sadie pokes and prods him until she’s satisfied and tells him to flip over. He clings to Jess like a starfish and looks up at the doctor.

 

There’s a weird exchange where Sadie tells him not to take the pills that she just handed him with a cup of water, and Jess pockets the rest of them while telling him to take them. He finally listens to Jess and sips down the little blue circles and prays for relief.

 

While he’s swallowing the water, Sadie notices the little lump in his throat and freaks out, which makes Jess panic and yell some more. He’s aware it existed and also really annoyed now because this is why he doesn’t like doctors. You go in for one thing and suddenly there are twelve other things wrong with you, and at least five of them will kill you.

 

The ladies agree to set up an ultrasound, despite his protests. Then he has to tell Jess that babies should be born head first after she dissects the example baby with her frantic hand motions.

 

\---

 

 

She takes him to get ice cream like he’s a little kid after.

 

Nick has lots of excuses for why he shouldn’t go to the ultrasound; most of them are a thinly veiled reference to his lack of capital.

 

“I’m not gonna go tomorrow,” he says seriously. She looks up at him from her banana split with those huge saucer plate eyes that look sad and afraid. “I’m really not, because I don’t want to get an ultrasound. I just don’t have time.” He grasps for excuses and falls back on the whale one. He really had meant to record whale songs when he came to LA. Her eyes harden and she says firmly, “You’re going.”

 

His mouth hangs open stupidly and he still tastes chocolate sauce and whipped cream swirled on his tongue.

 

“And I know you’re scared. But you know what my mom used to do when I got scared?” Jess asks.

 

Her Daffy Duck impression is truly horrible.

 

He pulls out the pain pill bottle and picks up his water. “Okay, I’ve got to go to work.”

 

“I’ll go with you,” she says immediately. Even though he tells her no, she tags along anyway. And the rest of the clowns are there at the damn circus, staring at him like he’s a kid with no hair and a fatal disease on a billboard. He can’t take all the pitiful looks so he takes another couple vagina pain pills and mellows right the fuck out. Enough that he makes them each their favorite drink and limps them over to their booth on a tray, sliding in next to Jess.

 

“I feel like, really warm in my uterus,” he croaks. “I feel good, real good.”  


Winston calls him a champ and Schmidt says Nick has a beautiful soul. Jess’ eyes water and get redder and redder until he finally wraps his hand around her shoulder and says her name. “Oh god!” she cries, and breaks into messy tears. “Hey, are you okay?” Nick asks, leaning into her face. Schmidt pulls her attention away and now he’s crying too.

 

Nick is horrified to discover that Winston is now also openly sobbing.

 

Jess hands him her phone. It has all the symptoms for a Thyroid Tumor pulled up on the little screen. Like, a lot of them match.

 

And the prognosis is death.

\---

 

He takes another couple pills because...well, he's dying, damn it. The 'doctor recommended dosage' no longer applies to him.

 

By eleven, the bar starts to empty out and he’s alone in the booth with Jess. Winnie is twinkling the ivory over in the corner. Schmidt is off with CeCe behind the bar.

 

Daniel Boone has four ears and Jess can’t talk at his funeral because she doesn’t know how he feels about her and also because her jokes are trash.

 

He drains his third beer and leans forward, trying to do the  whisper-yelling thing but probably he’s just yelling. The pills are really on top of him. “My funeral is my time to shine!” he shouts.

 

“I don’t want Daffy Duck voices and feeling sticks,” he says, then lowers his voice. “You don’t know how to be real,” he finishes lowly. And he knows he just stepped on a land mine because it explodes in her eyes and that fierce streak flares to life inside of her gaze. And now it’s directed at him.

 

“I know how to be real,” she intones, deadly serious and sad.

 

He knows it came out too mean but he just meant she doesn’t know how to be real in the kind of way that she’s like a fairytale princess that found herself in a noir crime novel. She is otherworldly and crazy and sweet and amazing and doesn’t fit in his dark shitty life because she’s just too… unreal.

 

He quits chasing that thought and gestures to his head. “Question… am I wearing a hat?”

 

\----

 

While everyone else humors him in their drunk state and they sing a nice song about him, (even CeCe is being nice…) Jess chooses that moment to get real. And Nick-like.

 

No more cutesy.

 

But he likes cutesy.

 

“Just tell me, if you could do anything, what would you do?” she asks, striding over.

 

“You know, I’m the guy who… I can’t just jump into something if I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I never have been that guy. Like, I’m the guy that if I don’t know what’s gonna happen, I don’t do something. Ever. I don’t care how bad I wanna do it, I don’t do it.” He gestures wildly with his hands.

 

That’s part of what is terrifying about _her._ She makes him act on impulse.

 

(...and it’s equal parts scary and wonderful.)

 

“Like, if everybody got into the ocean, and jumped in the water? I’m the guy on the beach guarding the wallets.”

 

And he now knows how the evening is gonna end as soon as they turn the key in the front door of the bar. Because she gives this little knowing smile, and even dying Nick can’t deny her any goddamned thing.

 

\--

 

The blast of ocean water to the face is like a double shot of reality-flavored expresso to the face. He’s instantly sobered up and runs naked from the waves, grabbing his jeans as his distantly thinks that now they’ve all seen his junk.

 

“Are you okay?” Jess asks, as she wraps his flannel around him. He shrugs it over his shoulders.

 

“No, I’m not okay, Jess!” he roars. “I’m not okay! I woke up today and I wanted to play a friendly game of touch football, then I hurt my back, and I went to your gynecologist, and now I might have cancer! So no, Jess, I’m not okay!” He pulls the shirt closed and stalks off to the dunes.

 

He drops down to the sand and folds into his body, elbows perched on his knees, miserable that he yelled at her and that he’s freezing and that everything is suddenly crashing around all at once. Winston drapes his coat over Nick’s back and leaves him to brood. His oldest friend. He will definitely be speaking at the funeral.

 

He makes sand angels and wonders if mean people are allowed in heaven.

 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jess’ pink coat looming up in the distance. She stops beside him, looking down.

 

“Is this seat taken?”

 

She helps him resume a sitting position, which is a feat considering the agony his back is still in.

 

His voice is raw and honest when he begins.

 

“I know that you’re right,” he says to Jess. “You’re right, I have to start doing things. I can’t just…” he looks out at the waves, endlessly rolling in, never static; always in motion.

 

“...you know,” he finishes quietly. She looks out and nods almost imperceptibly.

 

Time to be brave.

 

She'd said it best: "Just tell me, if you could do anything, what would you do?"

 

“Jess,” he says solemnly. “I like you a lot.” This feels like a confession. “I really do. I’m glad you’re around.” She smiles and her hand sneaks down his arm; she layers her palm over the top of his hand. “I’m not going to remember any of this in the morning, am I?” he half-hopes out loud.

 

“Most certainly not!” she says, as Daffy.  
  
“Oh no,” Nick grins back, in his mocking-the-drunk voice. It’s a little plea. He can’t go to the grave without her at least kind of knowing...about his feelings and such. The things that sneak into his mind when the loft is dark and quiet aside from the little moans slipping under the door frame and into his room from across the hall. How gone he’s been since the minute she walked in the door.

 

“Yeah, yes…” she laughs awkwardly. “We should go home.”  
  
“Yeah, let’s go home.”   


\--

 

Nick spends hours watching the sea and thinking all through the night. He hasn’t just sat and thought and existed like this since the night before he left for Los Angeles. He’d sat up on the roof of his childhood home in Illinois and pondered the stars and their movements, and the aliens and their movements, and how small and inconsequential all the things in his life were compared to the six billion other people and the gatrillions of other living things on this planet and the fact that this planet was just one little spec in an infinite and ever-expanding universe…

Jess stays awake for a while, just leaning her warm cheek into his shoulder, and when she eventually falls asleep like that, he worries about how stiff her neck will be in the morning. He gently shifts her into the crook of his arm and eases her down on the sand, then resumes his vigil.

 

He watches the sun rise over the water. No more time for bullshit, no matter what is growing in his neck. He’s thirty and not getting any younger. He’s gonna finish the book and find the stamp and record the whales and wait for the right time when he’s healthy and their timelines meet up, and then he is going to tell Jess about this burning ache in his chest and see if she has one that matches. And if she doesn’t, well… at least he’ll know.

 

When the birds start calling, he gently rubs the curve of her waist and she rolls back toward him. “Hey, we’ve gotta wake up,” he says, voice thick with exhaustion. “It’s the morning.”

\--

 

He hears nothing the nice doctor says after “It’s not cancer.” Not really, anyway. Because he’s healthy and that means all those lovely plans he’s let his brain wander through last night along the constellations have half a shot of coming true now, they won’t be cut short, he has the time to do this and do it right.

 

They pile back into Winston’s rust bucket Explorer and he leans in close to her, wraps his arm around the seat behind her and by extension, her. “Hey Jess,” he murmurs.

 

“Hmm?” she responds, looking at him with a hint of a smile on her cherry-lined lips.

 

“What happened last night?” He can’t keep a little matching grin from creeping onto his face to match hers. Her eyes dance, blue as the morning surf.

 

“Nothing,” she says, gaze searching his and giving a little snicker. He mirrors it back to her.

 

They get out when Winston can’t get it to start and begin the long walk home behind Schmidt and CeCe. Their arms bump back and forth because of how close they’re walking, and it’s like now that he knows that he’s going to try and be with her, he can’t stop the little contacts. The future suddenly looks a whole lot more interesting.

 

\----------

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick really thinks espresso is spelled expresso.


	8. Control the Fancyman.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Control" and "Fancyman: Part 1". There was a lot of flexibility in these episodes so I added some original scenes. The challenge with adding anything new is keeping to canon so they might be adjusted as needed later.

**chapter eight.**

 

Control the Fancy Man

  
  


Winston walks in on Nick in the shower one Friday morning, super early. Well, early for Nick Miller. So, like, 9 a.m.

 

The problem with this is that Nick has his fist over his junk and is murmuring “Jessjessjessjessjess” when Winston pulls back the curtain.

 

This isn’t new. It started as dreams; nonspecific sex dreams sometimes- in others, she replaced a different girl (and once, Teddy Roosevelt). In dreams, he’s done Jess five ways from Sunday and plenty of ways that aren’t even possible, like floating in space with her black hair spread out in a halo around her, stars blinking between the strands. The zero gravity had done great things to her boobs.

 

Now since the thing in his neck, he’s given himself free rein to think about her during his personal explorations; the sad thing is his waking brain isn’t even half as creative, so it’s usually just thoughts of her pinning him against his bedroom door and kissing him or an in-depth examination of his memory of her assets. At least he isn’t thinking about Caroline anymore. So this is sort of...healthy?

 

“Dude!” Winston yelps, ripping the curtain back the opposite direction. “What are you even doing home? I know what you’re doing…”

 

“Mia wanted some hours so I let her take my mid,” Nick yells back, mortified. Though he has interrupted his oldest friend at the same activity before so it is not without precedent.

 

“Well get out of the shower, already. And really- were you saying ‘ _Jess’_?”

 

“Like you don’t think about her too,” Nick snaps back. “We share 1500 square feet with a pretty young female the same age as we are, it’s just biology, my man.”  
  
“...When I first met her I had a dream she jerked me off with raccoon hands,” Winston admits, after a moment.

 

“Thank you for the validation.” Nick steps out wrapped in every towel he can find.

 

\---

 

Jess finds a brown china hutch thing out on the street and comes sprinting down the hall, yelling his name.

“What, Jess?” Nick asks, opening his bedroom door.

 

“I found something and I need your help to carry it!” she proclaims. He throws on jeans and follows her across the street. The cabinet is pretty heavy and has glass doors. Between the two of them, they get it across the street and into the elevator. They work quietly, but efficiently. He leans on the wood as they wait for the lift. “This looks like something my Ma has her Precious Moments collection in,” he says conversationally.

 

“Is that an insult?” she questions.

 

“Nah, it’s nice. Is this pine? I like it.”

 

“Me too,” Jess smiles. “I’m just gonna wipe it down with Chlorox wipes. I can’t believe they threw this away!”

 

“Probably a rich person,” Nick says. He uses his mocking voice. “‘Charles, I’m tired of all this yellow furniture. White furniture is in this season. Put this out for the street people.’”

 

“I think Outside Dave grabbed the matching coffee table,” Jess confides.

 

\---

 

The next day, Winston decides to bring up the debt between them after a night of poker and heavy drinking. Which apparently adds up to $487. Which is written on Nick’s stomach in Sharpie.

 

Schmidt also drew a bunch of dicks on his back because they’re apparently still in college. At least, that’s Schmidt’s maturity level. His artistic skills leave something to be desired apparently; Jess doesn’t recognize what they are.

 

She walks in and declares that the loft is a broken ecosystem dominated by an apex predator… aka Schmidt. His college roommate has declared their apartment a pine-free environment. Nick warns her not to mess with Schmidt, and Winston agrees, but she has that defiant look in her eyes which he knows means their sound advice is gonna be ignored.

 

\---

 

Schmidt smashes the hutch and the ecosystem spirals out of control like a hurricane has spun through and there’s no funding from FEMA. Nick drags the pieces of the hutch into his room and starts putting them back together with wood glue. Meanwhile, Jess takes Schmidt down to the pier to think about his control issues, and evidently abandons him there, because he refuses to come home the next day. Sure, he's relaxed... but now everyone is suffering.

 

Within 72 hours, the place could be condemned. He and Winston have never been great about cleaning, and the dishes pile up. And they are fighting incessantly about money. Without Schmidt cleaning and cooking, they eat a bunch of fast food and there’s nothing around for breakfast. The trash forms small mountains. Jess sends them to the store with $100 for groceries for the week, and he and Winston send up slapping each other until their faces are all bruised up. When they get back, Nick and Winston carry the hutch back into the living room. It’s missing a pane of glass, but that is easily replaced when they get some more money. They’re icing their faces with half a waffle each when Jess comes back in, tears in her eyes.

 

She wants them to be a family and to put her stuff in the living room. She wants to be a family, really? “With these clowns?” Nick answers lightly. He formally brings her into the family just before Schmidt walks in from his day at the beach. He has a crystal on his neck, a gas station poncho, and a small drum. Jess gives him a pair of fancy pants to seal the deal.

 

They all go to their rooms and leave Schmidt to decide what he’s going to do. As she turns to head into her space, Jess stops him.  
  
“Thanks for fixing the hutch, Nick,” she says gently. She smiles at him.

 

“No problem,” he says easily. “Had to do it around my house a few times- it’s easy to glue back together with those kinda joints.”

 

“Still, I appreciate it. I’ll get some new glass and put it in my room this weekend. Can’t upset the ecosystem too much,” she jokes.

 

They grin at each other and click their doorknobs shut at the same moment.

 

______

 

Nick drops his Razor phone in the toilet, and after ten years, it’s finally time to put the old boy out to pasture. Jess has the day off, so she agrees to go with him to pick out a new phone.

 

They pick and poke at the displays while the salesman inputs all Nick’s info into the system. He comes back wincing and announces he’s never seen a credit score this low.

 

That’s kinda what happens when you default on your student loans and credit cards. Luckily without a phone, they can’t call him, and since he owns nothing of value, they can’t really come after him, so…he can ignore them for another day. Besides, with the upcoming zombie apocalypse, credit scores aren’t going to matter. The only number which will have any value to a man’s life will be how many rounds he can carry in his ammo bag.

 

The oblivious sales people don’t seem to care that they are deeply mortifying him in front of the rest of the store, including Jess. As they crow about how low the number is, she scolds him briefly, asks if there’s a charity phone he can have, then slips out the glass door behind him.

Apparently, he’s gonna be the guy without a phone.

“You can go all Ghost Protocol on everyone,” she assures him as they walk back to the loft together. It’s nice.

 

\---

 

So at Jess’ school there’s some absentee father with tons of money that doesn’t like her teaching methods, and the principal is involved, so his poor friend has to grovel to keep the jerk from pulling his donation. Typical rich people.

 

As usual, Schmidt has a crazy solution (blame her period) and Winston has a reasonable one (just apologize) but she decides to side with Nick and uses his suggestion. Score! She’s even going to throw away her phone until Nick realizes that’s a bad idea because she’s his emergency contact number.

 

But because bad things happen to poor people, her car stalls out right outside the Fancyman’s office before she can go down there and yell at him about his privilege. She drives his car home and has to drop it off back at the Fancyman’s mansion the next day.

 

She arrives back at the loft flustered but softly pleased. Then she asks if he knows how to wash and wax a car because she’d kind of promised she’d return the car all spiffed up but she’s never had a car worth cleaning that deeply.

 

Nick’s never had one either, but he has done lots of fundraisers that involved washing cars, and the wax has directions, so he figures they’ll be all right. Schmidt is off somewhere else, CeCe isn’t available, and Winston is spending Friday night with Shelby, so they tackle the project that evening.

 

“At least it’s not a crazy color, so if our wax job isn’t the best, it won’t matter,” he says confidently. Jess is scrubbing away at the roof of the sedan, then he almost swallows his tongue as she progresses down to the hood and leans all the way over, her short shorts riding up and letting a bit of her cheeks sneak out of the bottom of them. She uses big circles to get the whole hood soaked in suds and he’s trying really hard not to feel like a creep. She turns her head, seemingly oblivious as usual, and asks “Do you think we used enough soap?”

 

“It’s enough soap, Jess,” Nick responds, sounding only a little strangled. As soon as she turns back he quickly yanks on the seam of his jeans. Christ.

 

“I’m gonna go start filling the clean water buckets, then,” she replies airily as she finishes swiping across the trunk. “You figure out the wax stuff.”

 

“We have to let it dry first. It’s better to do that in the morning, really early, before the day heats up,” he responds, reading the back of the package.

 

He helps her with the buckets and they get the car rinsed off and parked in the safest spot they know of, which is a garage that’s $15/night and two miles from the loft. They stick close in the dark on the walk home and dodge the usual unsavory nightlife.

 

“Soooo… it’s Friday night, and Rick Grimes is calling my name. You?” Jess asks perkily.

 

“That show is so inaccurate,” he grouses, “but I guess I can be convinced…”

 

They share a bowl of popcorn and a blanket, her feet in his lap.

 

\---

 

Waxing the car takes a little longer than he expected, and she feels nervous going alone to drop it off, so Nick agrees to tag along with her to the Fancyman’s party.

 

They joke all the way up the driveway, that probably used to be bordered by a moat. She’s wearing blue heels, a blue headband, and blue belted green dress with a blue cardigan and looks like a cool mountain stream. He has a feeling Cece had a hand in this outfit because it is immaculately pressed and chosen with a stylist’s eye to flatter all her good features. Not that she has any bad features, he thinks, appreciating the length of her legs in the heels as she leads him through the ostentatious mansion.

 

Then they enter Fancyman’s study, and something comes over Nick. He’s had this feeling before; in the first law office library he ever experienced. The rich dark wood, the smell of leather and tobacco and the promise of wealth in exchange for cleverness and hard work. It was a deeply appealing sensation in his twenties that faded when other realities set in for a poor man from the wrong side of the tracks in Chicago. He’d chased the white collar dream and come up short.

 

“Jess, when I put my hand on this desk I feel sexually proficient for the first time in my life!” he groans, smoothing his fingers over the leather blotter.   
  
“But Nick! This man stands for everything you hate!” Nick tosses a wooden decoy duck from one hand to the other, studying it. Jess scrambles off to find her benefactor.

 

This is the kind of life Nick wanted, once. Maybe the kind he still wants, deep down. It’s the kind of life that Jess certainly deserves. He doesn’t agree with her best friend about a lot of things, but he does think that she’s correct in her guess that this guy must be attracted to Jess- and maybe she will end up as Lady Fancyman of the Fancy Estate. It’s always seemed like a weird anomaly that this girl dropped into their lives when she’s the kind that works her way up from nothing. Kind of like Schmidt really…

 

He peers into the paperweight which has a hundred dollar bill preserved in it and wonders if being encased in plastic makes the bill more or less valuable. On the bottom, there’s a little label that says “My first $100- 1987. RS” He wishes he had a spare $100 to waste.

 

There’s a burgundy sweater draped over the chair back, so as he sits in the chair, Nick pulls it over his head. The fabric is soft and lightweight, but warm, like wool from a newborn deer or something. He wonders if the Fancyman shot it himself.

 

A few minutes later, he finally meets the guy in person. He doesn’t really look like a prick, but appearances can be deceiving. Mostly he looks like an older, thinner version of Nick, actually. It’s kinda weird.

 

What is also weird is that the guy just gives him a cell phone when Nick says he doesn’t have one. That’s the kind of rich guy Nick would be if he was ever rich, he decides. The kind that solves problems as second nature. No sweater? Take mine. No phone? I have a spare. Pretty girl needs a ride? She can take my car. It is very hard to hate the Fancyman, Nick realizes. He gets what Jess is struggling with when the guy is sickeningly rich but also insanely nice.

 

Russell is his name. And apparently, he used to be like Nick.

 

“Then one day I realized I wanted to grow up,” he says. It settles down deep in Nick’s chest and lodges like a stray bullet. It doesn’t feel any better, either. 30-year-old bartenders tend to have reached the zenith of personal growth, says the general consensus.

 

Russell leaves him with a new phone and a cloud of confusion. Jess comes charging in a moment later and grabs him by the elbow, towing him out behind her.

 

“Jess, why are we leaving? And why are you all wet? Did you take a bath in his tub because you wanted to see what he felt like? Because weirdly, I get that,” he says breathlessly, as she releases him and he turns to face her. They’re just outside the front door. Other party guests mill around them.

 

“No, I wanna leave because we don’t fit in here, Nick!” she exclaims, motioning at the house.

 

“Look, I know I’ve been saying you can’t give in to this guy, but I don’t think you should run from him, either,” he says honestly. “Cause no matter where you go,” he continues, then drops his voice to a dramatic whisper, “ _he could find you_. I believe that.”

 

“No,” she responds plainly. “Running’s good, I’m gonna run.” She turns to her car, and he reaches out and takes her elbow, pulls her to face him.

 

“Hey Jess, stop!” She looks down at where his hand is resting on her, then looks into his eyes, searching. “This might complicate things, but I’m in love with him,” he pleads.

“Shut up!” she yells.

 

“No, I won’t shut up! He smells like strong coffee and going to see a man about a horse!”

 

“You’re being ridiculous, Nick, let’s go!” She has panic rising in her eyes.

 

“I am ridiculous, okay, but no! Be a grown up.” This is the kind of place she belongs. Nick has lost his chance, but it’s not too late for her. She motions helplessly down at her water-soaked dress. His eyes sweep it and return to her face and his next words are a little raw. “He likes ya, Jess. Go back in there. I think it would be good for ya.” She looks at him and smiles a little, so he makes a joke. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m in love with him,” he concludes, and she actually laughs, then heads back toward the front door. He shouts a little pep-talk as she goes, then follows her a beat later back into the party.

 

He lingers at the doorway, watching her flirt with Russell when she suddenly plunges into the pond. Nick runs, trying to pull off the sweater and fold it as he goes, dropping his new phone in the process. By the time he reaches her, she’s chanting “Koi in my dress! Koi in my dress!” He and Russell get her hauled out and she drives with trash bags over her seats the whole way home.

 

"I'm proud of you," he says from the passenger seat, politely refraining from commenting on the lingering odors permeating the sedan.

 

"Thanks, Nick," she replies genuinely.

____

  
  
  


  


  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
